Spatial Audio Raven Preamp


Spatial is supposed to be shipping the first "wave" from pre orders of this preamplifier in May, does anyone have one on order? Was hoping to hear about it from AXPONA but I guess they were not there. It's on my list for future possibilities. It seems to check all my boxes if I need a preamp.

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@curiousjim

The answer is probably yes.  We have run them with 86 dB 4 ohm speakers and it worked just fine.  What kind of load is your speaker?  Can you tell me the speaker so I can look up the spec?  Unless it is some sort of terrible reactive load and you are trying to create rock concerts in a cathedral they would probably work just fine.

A pair of subs don’t need to be exotic or anything, just fill in the gap below the horn cutoff. And two are definitely better than one. I prefer stereo bass, but the home theater folks use a mono input to drive 2, 3, or 4. I don’t care about sound effects on movie soundtracks (who cares), but do care about wideband sound.

One thing about the Blackbirds is they will tolerate absurdly reactive loads, since they are push-pull Class A and do not use feedback. No protection circuits are needed.

When I was playing around with Cornwall IV I pulled all the cheap $4 MKP caps out of the crossover and replaced them with vcap odam.  I put path audio resistors in there as well.  The main resistor directly in series with the midrange compression driver was a $1 sand resistor on a $5000 pair of speakers.  I was not impressed.  The sonic improvement was quite staggering.  I then used a pair of decent quality Hsu subs run with their speaker level inputs with pigtail cables from each speaker.  I simply ran a stereo pair of subs, one by each speaker.  Much better....   Finally sold it all and got a custom pair of open baffle speakers made with a horn as the top end.  Embarrased the Cornwalls and sub combo  .....  Klipsch are lots of fun, but they are not the top of the heap when stock.  They can be improved. Hence the millions of Klipsch modding threads in the world.

The Raven has split windings on the output transformer so both RCA and XLR’s can be used at the same time (the RCA output uses one-half of the secondary winding). So feel free to use to use the RCA output to power the active subs.

@lynn_olsen This suggests that there is a grounded center tap of the output transformer. Normally a balanced line output (if it supports AES48) is floating (this practice is to prevent ground loops). Did you provide a switch to break the center tap's ground connection if the RCA is not used? I don't see it in rear panel photos.

I received my Raven preamp a week ago.  I've got about 80 hours on it now.  

It's great!  I'm really digging the expanded tone colors, instrument textures, sense of space, and natural non-mechanical sound.

My system is all digital using a Holo May DAC into the Raven.  My main amplification is via a pair of DIY First Watt M2 monoblocks.  I also own a pair of Hypex Nilai 500 monoblocks that I have been using with the Raven.  I am running balanced from Holo May to preamp, and then out single-ended out to the M2 monos.  With the Nilai monos the system is fully balanced.  My speakers are Pure Audio Project Quintet15 open baffles.

I'm finding that I'm listening more to whole albums, or parts of albums, instead of jumping around to different selected tracks and playlists of selected tracks.  The music on the album sounds excellent, so I just keep going.  This is how I used to listen to vinyl before I developed my unfortunately terminal record mold allergy.

I found out about the Raven from this thread a few months ago.  I've had a checklist of features, getting larger over the years, that I wanted to see in a commercial vacuum tube preamp.  The Spatial Audio Lab Raven amazingly met my requirements.  I immediately ordered one.

More in my next post...