Steelhead as a preamp?

Rloggie, I owned the Steelhead for several years and, during that time, occasionally ran the Steelhead as a full-function preamp in addition to using it solely as a phono stage into a separate line-stage preamp. Whereas I regard the Steelhead as a world-class phono stage, I would characterize the line stage aspect of its performance as very competent but short of the performance of a SOTA line stage.

In my system, the Steelhead sounded more "tubey" than I prefer with bass that was a bit "wooly" and sound that was a bit less transparent and less extended at the frequency extremes than a first-class line stage.

So, in short, while I think the line stage in the Steelhead is very good, IMO you can improve on its performance significantly (and at significant cost) if you pair it with a first-class line stage.

Hi,
I owned the Steelhaed II for about two years. Used alone as line/phono stage and also combined with my two line stages Burmester 808/5 and Klyne 7LX5.

Sound was much more dynamic and transparent; much more present using Steelhead alone. Using the Steelhead only as phono pre I got good experiences only using the variable outputs turning the volume control on about 12 o'clock. However I would not combine the steelhead with one of my line stages anymore.

Bye,
Marco

Rloggie,
I only tried running the Steelhead direct (fixed output) using a BAT 51SE line stage. The sound was much better when I ran the Steelhead without the BAT but I had to use the variable output.

By the way, I agree with the comments in support of the Steelhead's MM inputs. I experimented running my Dynavector XV-1s into the MC inputs (which routes the signal through the autoformers) and into the MM inputs. I found the sound through the MM inputs to be more transparent as noted above. As long as you have sufficient gain using the Steelhead's active gain stages, I too would recommend using the MM inputs over the MC inputs.

The flexibility of the MM vs. MC inputs along with all of the other features is very compelling. I was just hoping to find the best way to use the SH without having to buy a preamp. I'm going to go ahead with one and use it until I have another pre in the house. Maybe I'll find I don't need one in my setup, but I suspect I will. Thanks for all comments and in advance for any more thoughts.