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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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In Reply to: thanks, a few questions. posted by mikel on July 28, 2002 at 10:28:10:
Mikel:In almost every case the active will outperform the passive, enabling a slightly clearer, slightly more detailed sound and a slightly lower noise floor. This is because of the extremely low output impedance of the Active Linestage.
But your system is such an ideal application for a passive that it may be quite dificult to hear an improvemant with the active. Although I could see that the passive may equal the active in a system like yours, I could never imagine it actually outperforming the active. It's just about impossible to beat an ultra low output impedance for insuring that the signal arrives at the power amp intact and noise free.
Over the years we have offered a trade-back policy to our passive customers so they can trade up to the active. In all that time, not one passive user has preferred the passive. All have preferred the active in spite of it's much higher price.
It would not seem to make sense that by adding more to the circuit that the fidelity could actually be improved but the audio signal that comes out of the volume control can be quite fragile. Going directly into high quality output amps from the volume control seems to lock-in the shape of the signal and make it more robust so that it can get through the cables intact. I think that the reason so many solid state active linestages sound bright and so many listeners avoid them is because of the the volume control distortion. Since an active linestage will also see to it that it's volume control distortion is passed accurately to the power amp, that means brightness and irritation. But getting rid of the volume control distortion itself means that the output amps can really help in delivering the audio signal to the power amp in it's purest form, in the exact same shape it was in when it left the source. Which of, course, is also an active device.
Guy Hammel, Placette Audio
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Follow Ups
- Re: thanks, a few questions. - placete@aol.com 07/29/0211:10:14 07/29/02 (0)
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