Home Tweakers' Asylum

Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ.

There are 3 kinds of passive preamps (at least)

Resistive: excellent soundat high volume levels, muffles the music and the dynamics at low volume settings, due to high series impedance.

Transformer: sounds as you described;
Advantage: gets rid of most digital upper harmonics.
Disadvantage: soft bass, due to the dual conversion process: electric to magnetic in the primary, magnetic to electric in the secondary. It is THE Ideal solution if you have a few mV DC on your source otput.

Autoformer: there is a direct DC path between the input and output.
To my ears they sound excellent at any volume setting. It's fascinating to be able to follow the Keith Jarret trio's intricate bass/cymbal/piano interplay at 3 AM with the neighbors peacefully asleep.
At the loudest volume settings, it is basically a long copper interconnect, no resistive or magnetic effects to speak of.
IMHO it's the most transparent solution, very faithful to the musical emotion hidden in our ceedees .

As far as I know, all of the above must be driven from a source impedance of less than 1 K and see a load impedance of more than 10K, to work properly.
I hope this helps clarify the differences
Carlos


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