Passive Pre - No Regrets?

Pubul57, given my personal experience with 5 passive units, I suspect he is suggesting that any passive unit cannot give the speed, transparency, and soundstage of at least some active units. I personally value the purity of passive units caused, I believe, by their lack of parts, but I have never been able to tolerate the lack of their ability to give the pace of live music. This is largely the lack of dynamics and probably reflects their not having the matching of impedances that is present in active units.

Tbg, just curious, were any of the passives a TVC design. If so could you mention which one. My understanding is that TVCs are not prone to the impedance mismatching issues that the resistor-based passives are prone to. Thanks

Unfortunately this is not the case. You listened to tapes that were slowly deteriorating over time played on a tape deck that added it's own colorations played through speakers or headphones that also added colorations.

This is not exactly true- the tapes were new, the tape machine was rebuilt and very stable and calibrated. This is the sort of thing that you apparently have to do in order to understand how powerful it is as a reference! I've seen audiophiles turn ghost white after being fooled by the direct microphone feed (startled at how *real* it sounds- far more so than any stereo using a recording can!).

The value of working with master tapes is that you are there at the recording session so you *know* what the music is supposed to sound like.

Well Tbg, I have the dynamics of active with my passive, carefull matching and testing was required but now I got transparency of passive and the dynamics of active...

TVC performance is still related to impedance matching. I had audiozone TVC passive which worked great with tube amps but was lifeless with pass lab amp ( inped 10K). You can look up the specs on S& B transformer in the desired attenuattion and see if it could work for you.