Dear Jloveys: Our unit was designed for my( our ) own priorities ( like a music lover/audiophile ) and was designed not thinking to put on the market, this commercial subject occur by " accident " a welcome one but not our main priority including today.
Over my audio years I owned several audio items and I can remember those Zenith and Telefunken " consoles " that were all purpose items that comes with everything you need to sound reproduction: TT/tonearm/cartridge/Phonolinepreamp/amplifier/tunner, everything integrated in the same " body ".
After that I remember: Pionner, Sansui, Mackintosh, Luxman, etc, where these units were integrated Phonolinepreamps ( at least ), on those years there was not " separates ".
Time goes on and appear the separate units for different reasons where maybe the most important was a commercial one: charge a price for two units instead only one.
In those times the know-how between the customers and even between the manufacturers was really low aganist today overall know-how.
At the beguining the cartridges that I use it were MM type but later appear/discover the MC alternative and things change because some of the integrated units can't handle the MC ones and appear the step-up transformers ( that I use it for several years till my know-how improve to tell me that the SUT makes a heavy degradation to the cartridge signal. ) that till today IMHO are still making damage to the quality analog performance alternative.
So, for years I was looking for an active ( no step up: internal or external. ) and integrated ( cables and connectors from my point of view are one of he worst enemy against quality performance, unfortunately we can't live with out it. )
Phonolinepreamp, then I find a good unit ( for that time ) that can handle two cartridges ( MM/MC ) the Classe DR-7 ( that over the time I modified to improve its quality performance. ).
Ater this Classe I try/test sevreal integrated and not phono/line stages: FM Acoustic, Threshold, Audio research, Conrad Johnson, Gryphon, Audio Note, Levinson, Krell, Jadis, you name it.
No one meet my " music lover " priorities so we decided ( Josè and I ) that if we really want to achieve our targets we have to go for our own design ( this was more than 12 years ago ) and we did it and build our first unit ( battery power supply ) only to show if can " sounds " in a decent way , well what we heard was not a very decent performance but at least not sounded too bad, so we were exited for our " success " , btw it is really a emotional event when you design for the first time an audio item build it then test it and voila it " sounds "!!!
After this " lucky " event we put on paper our targets choosing the best trade-offs to obtain in the best way the top quality performance that we were looking for for too many years .
To write the targets was an in deeep research to understand not only the main functions ( why a Phonolinepreamp exist. ) that a Phonolipreamp must to have but to understand too the main challenges to design, test and execution of that design.
The result is the Essential 3160 Phonolinepreamp ( integrated, no step up, separate power supplys, separate dual mono line stage and separate dual mono phono stages in two stand alone chasis/boxes. ).
This was and is our approach any trade-off here is something that we accept and choose in favor of quality performance, of course that from a different point of view like be Jcarr it self the approach could be different and cetainly the performance can/could be different too.
Jloveys, don't be disapointed because I can tell you that almost any designer choose the trade-offs that for him are the best ones: sometimes by commercial subjects.
You can read here that like Atmasphere we choose almost the same alternative that is: an integrate Phonolinepreamp.
Every designer has its own ideas ( like Manley or Lamm that choose step-up transformers and stand alone units. ) and I can asure you that everyone can explain you in deep its approach advantages and disadvantages.
So, which is the best approach? ( everything the same ), a question that has several answers as several designers exist and certainly this is not the right forum to speak in deep about, what I can say to you is that in general all those designers has more in common about that differences. As Dan point out: there are no absolutes here! and that's why many of us ( designers or not ) follow looking for the " heaven " about.
The real reward about is that the customer has several very good alternatives and I think that the very best it is for coming!
Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.
