TRL Dude or Joule 150 MKII for Major Pre Upgrade


Thinking of either of these for what I view as a huge pre upgrade in my system. Current system is:

-Celestion A3
-Krell KAV250a (500 wpc/4 ohms).
-Nohr CD-1
-Rotel 995 preamp

I am looking to pickup warmth, depth and much more soundstage. Quality bass is also important to me. I want to keep the Celestions and feel that my current pre is the weakest link. Will also will update my digital source and ss amp down the road.

My thinking is that it will be worth paying up a bit for a higher quality pre that I can grow into.

Also I have a small naive question...with either of these pre amps will the sound difference be that great compared to the Rotel.

Thanks...any comments are appreciated.

-Iggy
iggy7
Al, a couple of things I pointed out to Grannyring were that I did in fact speak with Bill Whitlock back in Aug, 2010, and posted about my conversation in another thread that you too were involved in. I hadn't remembered that thread, but I found it in a search. I was using a Lamm LL2 Dlx at the time, which has a rising output impedance at low frequencies and my concern was bass roll-off. My post is at the end of the thread here;
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?aamps&1280795210&read&keyw&zzbill=whitlock
Bill basically told me the Jensen posted specs apply to the "worst case" scenario where the load is 10K ohms. Good news for Grannyring is that the input impedance of his Atlas amp is enormous at 940K ohms! Here is what JA at S'phile had to say;
The Atlas's voltage gain into 8 ohms was the same for balanced and unbalanced drive, at 25dB, which is lower than normal. Both inputs preserved absolute polarity (ie, were non-inverting), the XLR jacks being wired with pin 2 hot. Specified at a very high 470k ohms for the unbalanced input and twice that for the balanced, the amplifier's input impedances were at least those values at low and midrange frequencies, dropping slightly but inconsequentially at 20kHz. (With such high impedances, there is inevitably a large error in measuring the exact figure.) The Crossover inputs behaved identically to the main inputs in these respects.
I suspect with such a large input impedance, Grannyring is good to go with the transformers.

So simple impedance of the source is partially ruled out- we are OK with a relatively high impedance at the input, so long as it is balanced. What happens if we use the same source to drive the RCA single-ended?

Grannyring, are you able to use the Jensen running single ended? How you would do that is to use the RCA input of the amplifier by using an adapter with the Jensens, one that ties pin 3 and pin 1 of its XLR output together.

This is still pointing to an issue with the input wiring where it is able to pick up noise from inside the amp. I suspect that it is common mode to the inverting input and so is not picked up when the amp is driven balanced.
Atmasphere, I have not tried to run the Jensen with rca's as yet. I am so thrilled with the sound right now. Seems my amp really sounds best through the xlr inputs. All I know is my system has never sounded better plus is now very quiet.