Grant Fidelity B-283 Tube Buffer: Worthwhile or No

I bought one of them, it is connected to my cambridge 840C CD player RCA outputs (the other XLR outputs go directly to my integrated amp XLR inputs), it is difficult to notice the difference when switching between inputs because there is a voltage difference between the XLR and RCA connections on my CD player, so you must first level them and then judge the differences, in my opinion it is not a bad unit, but it will not turn a solid state amp into a valve system.....in my particular case, I am using a class D integrated amp and I´d rather prefer the transparency on my system against the "sweet distorted" sound of the buffer, my idea was to use it while playing MP3 or other compressed music but in the end I rarely use it.....hope this helps!

Demianm,
yes that does help. I do think buffers in general are worthy of greater discussion, too often people turn their nose up at them & take an anti position based on tired old formulaic nonsense about wire + gain which I am sick to death of hearing about because in a lot of cases it has got nothing to do with actually "listening" to different system set ups & more to do with entrenched pre conceived ideas.

Morning David,

Last year I was privy to a session in a private home"featuring " Products

imported/distributed by Grant

Fidelity--a fancy looking CD player with flashing Blue Lights(!)

which name escapes me, and

some massive Chinese Amps--Sheng-Ya.

Both the above were poor to average to say the least ( Speakers were Von Schweikert VR7's Not Grant's)

The Ls35a " clones" they sell are in the same boat in my opinion.

Caveat Emperor that's all I'm saying

Good Luck,

Des

> What's an inexpensive tube preamp of fairly
> good quality?

What's the budget?

There are two versions of the B-283, one for mid-fi or vintage systems and the MKII for higher end systems, they are designed to add a taste of tubes to a SS source player, many thousands of happy customers have found other uses for them as well. The main thing they seem to do is convert SS types to tube :)

Team 212, whoever you are, never heard of you, but you sound like typical sore loser competiton to me, we don't have a CD player with flashing blue lights and not sure which big ShengYa's you are referring to or where or even if you ever heard them, but the big flagship ShengYa's have been reviewed by Dagogo's reviewer that only does big power and expensive amps as being as good and better as anything out there at any price.

Maybe the VR7's don't match with them or maybe they aren't good enough for the ShengYa amps which will reveal their weaknesses if any.

Again those that have heard my version of the LS3/5A beside the originals generally wonder what they were thinking with the fake bass hump, but maybe you like fake bass. Even those that are making current versions who have them are quite impressed.

Ian Grant.