I am enjoying my analog system, but what can I do to improve?

I recently got the Benchmark LA4 preamp. It sounds punchier and more dynamic than Allnic, so I returned the Allnic. On some streaming music, LA4 sounds slightly more etched, however. I guess you have to live with some compromises.

Dear @chungjh  : At its prie tag your LA4  solid state preamp is really an achievement and a challenge for almost any preamp out there. Very carefully designed and with high knowledge and skills levels.

" 

Benchmark's LA4 is the widest-bandwidth, widest-dynamic-range, lowest-noise, lowest-distortion preamplifier I have encountered.—John Atkinson "

and the unit works in the analog domain.

Take enough play hours with in your system to " understand " the whole improvements and then play again with changes in your seat position and tyny changes in the speaker position. With what you have you need to fine tunning your room/system and then you will know if you need or want to try a " better " cartridge or the like. Enjoy what you have, enjoy MUSIC.

R.

Although I am not as vehemently opposed to the L7000 as is Raul, I agree with him in general that you ought to work with what you have, first.  If you can borrow another linestage, either tube or SS, that uses another method of output coupling, you might learn whether or not in your case the Allnic is holding you back.  (Capacitor coupling is not perfect, either.  In that case the results depend upon the quality and value of the capacitor used.  Direct coupling often requires the introduction of a servo circuit at the output in order to cancel DC offset, and in that case, the design of the servo comes into play.)  And of course, experimenting with cartridges and headshells is absolutely certain to change the sound.  You might find magic in that direction.

 What I find is that small ensemble music, like jazz, sounds very good. Large orchestral music such as Carmina Burana doesn't sound very good, even though the sound stage seems ok. I seem to be losing clarity of the chorus vs a solo singer like Diana Krall. I guess it is the room size thing.

@chungjh  : To fine tunning a room/system and evaluate that room/system quality we need a very well know overall proccess where one of the main proccess characteristics is to listen always the same tracks ( maybe around 10-12 different kind of music tracks. ) and must be tracks that we already know as well as the fingers of our hands tracks that we know its sounds really good tracks that the quality of the sound is showed at the must " natural " and " neutral " way as if we were listen it in a live MUSIC event seated at near field position and if possible that even we already listened in other systems. We can't make any kind of system evaluation using recorded tracks just at random with tracks where we just do not know what to look for..So you need to define specific targets for your listen evaluations/tests.

Digital tracks could be the better way for evaluation purpose instead analog but I'm not saying not use analog you can do it too: a mix of digital/analog tracks.

R.