No bass on BAT VK-3ix SE preamp?

Check the impedance of you amp, and watch the capacitance of your cables if they're long.

My BAT has nice bass but I have an older 3i with 4 6922's and 2 6v6 toobs.

loon

If I remember right, those preamps have a high output impedance. If you amp's input impedance is low, your bass will get chopped off.

I had a 3i with a McIntosh amp and had killer bass quantity and dynamics.

Arthur

Holy cow! I was correct. I just looked at JA's measurements and the output impedance in the bass is 7k unbalanced and 14k balanced!! I call that a terrible design but whatever. The point is that an impedance mismatch is most likely the cause of your lack of bass (and probably hurts the highs too). Maybe even cables are to blame as well. What amp and interconnects do you have?

Arthur

Thanks for the respones. Right now I have a Modwright SE preamp. And Channel Island Audio 200 monoblocks class D amps. Imput impedance is 100k ohms for CIA. Signal Cable Silver Resolution everything for cables and interconnects, inductance 0.13 uh/ft. Avalon Opus Ceramique speakers. The first thing I did was try my back up amp, a 400 watt Belles solid state amp, imput impedance 25,000 ohms or 25k. Same thing, bass a light distant rumble. I do not know enough about impedance to know if thats a mismatch. I will be getting a BAT VK-75 this week from a nice gentle man here on Audiogon. As soon as I get a set of balanced cables from Signal Cable so I can hook up the VK-75, I'll find out if it's the impedance. Thanks again!

That seems odd to me. I currently have a BAT VK-3iXSE in my system on loan, and at first the bass was too much. It was new, so I ran it for 240 straight hours (10 days). The results were much better, the bass is now much tighter. At first the bass was over-powering and loose, now, it's still powerful, but much better definition.