https://www.firstwatt.com/prod.html one can see from the chart that even among nelson's gaggle of fw amps, the sit3 is particularly low gain... so yes it would benefit from a higher gain preamp, line stage or direct source |
garyalex It’s very simple. If it goes loud enough for you with your gear, you don’t need extra gain. Remember what Nelson Pass says about "added gain" that’s not needed. Your just adding more noise with it, by throwing away vital "source signal" to ground with the volume control, just to so you can make it back up again with that extra "added gain" stage, which introduces more noise and distortions. Cheers George |
Experiment. The suggestion using a Schiit SYS is very valid. I own two FW amps. An F5,and J2. I have two systems. One uses a passive pre,the other is an active tube. I have run both amps with the passive,driving a pair of not too sensitive Graham Chartwell LS3/5's. The cops will definitely not be called to my house for disturbing the peace,but the volume gets loud enough for my needs. |
Here's an example of the OP's situation. I bought a Schiit Aegir power amp which doesn't have a lot of gain on its own. I originally purchased a Schiit Saga+ preamp to go with it, which uses a tube buffer in a unity gain circuit -- it adds no additional gain beyond what the source outputs. While it worked fine with most recordings, there were some recorded at a lower level in which having the volume knob all the way up on the Saga+ was short of the desired playback level. I ended up switching to a Lyr 3 preamp which has low gain (+3.5 dB) and high gain (+17 dB) settings. It turned out the low gain setting was all I needed to fix my playback gain problem for all of my recordings. |
