In due time, the Mini Passive arrived from the UK, where it is assembled in its entirely. When Wes Young at Tisbury Audio offered an eval of their Mini Passive Preamplifier II, I thought, “This might be just the thing!” I have a 20 dB H–pad that I can insert at the amps inputs, but it’s fixed and is seldom the right amount of loss for the program at hand…What to do? Although I prefer the sound of Amarra’s volume control over the e22’s (sorry George), neither strikes me as neutral as the plain ol’ passive H pad. I can add the needed loss in one of three ways in Sonic Studio’s Amarra, my player software in the e22 or as a resistive pad between the DAC and the AMPX. My power amp lacks any input sensitivity adjustment so, I’ve had to look elsewhere… These days, you often find output voltages to be closer to 2 Volts than 1. To better address a gain staging mismatch, some more enlightened power amplifier manufacturers have input sensitivity controls since, due to specsmanship wars, not as many hi–fi sources actually send 1 Volt nominal peak–to–peak signals anymore. At the other extreme, “popular” music, such as rock or dance, usually requires up to 24 dB of padding or loss somewhere ahead of the power amp so either it (or I) doesn’t clip. This is the case mostly with classical recordings that have a fair amount of headroom built in. Here’s the rub depending on the content I’m playing, I can sometimes leave the source gain at or near full volume. The AMPX is usually driven directly by an exaSound e22 DAC, via a set of Soundstring GEN II Beta 2-22S XLR to XLR cables… For a while, I also had a set of sealed, stand mounted two way ARCONA 40s, the subject of last quarter’s review. At the moment, it’s driving a pair of equally satisfying Fritz Morel 6 vented, stand mounted two ways, nominally rated at 8 Ω. To my dismay, I didn’t win the recent Powerball jackpot, and thus cannot afford such exquisite engineering.Īs you may know, I have a modest power amp as my reference, the lovely 40 W into 8 Ω Lindell AMPX. At the very high end, you can purchase a preamp and power amp from the same vendor and they will work, in concert, to dial up only the gain needed to drive the load. It seems there’s always too much or too little, never the perfect Goldilocks amount. Sometimes, it’s the little things that drive you crazy… take, for example, gain.

Amarra symphony irc