Having recently bought blind of ebay.......a valve pre amp whose provenance is probabley china and sold through Hong Kong.
The unit out the box worked and had a fair sound, a bit warm and muddled but not unacceptable. So a quick look inside revealed a NAFF [and I now know what it means, thank you bbc2 !] vol pot of such limited quality it make my previous worst [the one out sonic impact] look positively good. So out with the soldering iron, out with the pot, and in with a 50k alps blue I just had around, wired up with silver in ptfe to loss the rather nasty looking ic wire. Now for a listen, less warm more detail and definately more dynamic but still veiled. It was at this point it went to Rsands place for the cable comparisons. If you look in articles section you can see a pic of the pre, is that garish brown thing on the floor.
So after getting crimble out the way and a couple of cable builds, I decided to have a longer look at the signal input side of the pre. The fist thing is the sockets these don't look too bad, on a par with the best maplin do, so they can stay for now. These car connected to the selector switch via short length of Oehlbach the pure sound IC cable then from the selector switch to the pcb by more of this blue cable.
At this point I though it a good idea to have a quick search of the web to see if it was a pucker cable, supprise supprise it is
http://www.bestes-kabel.de/CMS/product-detail.php?sprache=en&artikelnummer=1014
As I expected this is billed as mid price cable, I wonder how many people have been fooled ! More of that later!
The cable is a typical foamed insulation with lap screen and a silver plated stranded core. To cut a long story short I ripped it all out and rewired with solid twisted pair of 0.5mm 4n silver in ptfe sleeve. Rebuilt, put back into system switch on leave to warm up, play cd .......
I don't often get those bloody hell moments but I had on ...so were did the music come from! fast clean dynamic full bass sharpe imaging. That cable was strangling the pre, it must be utter shi*e.
So hears a warning if anyones got any Oehlbach the pure sound , throw it away now do yourself a massive favour!
I was going to have a swap of some of the resistors in the signal path but its now sounding so good I'm going to wait a bit !
Oh didn't I mention what the pre was, silly me! see here.
ebay item number: 5786540808
With the obvious caveats listed above this is a fine pre for the price...[mine was just over half that price !!] so making it excellent value. As to the vendor can't fault him, he even answers emails!
My next mods for this pre will be to loose the front panel and replace with 5mm mirror black perspex and some black knobs of my own design.
The unit out the box worked and had a fair sound, a bit warm and muddled but not unacceptable. So a quick look inside revealed a NAFF [and I now know what it means, thank you bbc2 !] vol pot of such limited quality it make my previous worst [the one out sonic impact] look positively good. So out with the soldering iron, out with the pot, and in with a 50k alps blue I just had around, wired up with silver in ptfe to loss the rather nasty looking ic wire. Now for a listen, less warm more detail and definately more dynamic but still veiled. It was at this point it went to Rsands place for the cable comparisons. If you look in articles section you can see a pic of the pre, is that garish brown thing on the floor.
So after getting crimble out the way and a couple of cable builds, I decided to have a longer look at the signal input side of the pre. The fist thing is the sockets these don't look too bad, on a par with the best maplin do, so they can stay for now. These car connected to the selector switch via short length of Oehlbach the pure sound IC cable then from the selector switch to the pcb by more of this blue cable.
At this point I though it a good idea to have a quick search of the web to see if it was a pucker cable, supprise supprise it is
http://www.bestes-kabel.de/CMS/product-detail.php?sprache=en&artikelnummer=1014
As I expected this is billed as mid price cable, I wonder how many people have been fooled ! More of that later!
The cable is a typical foamed insulation with lap screen and a silver plated stranded core. To cut a long story short I ripped it all out and rewired with solid twisted pair of 0.5mm 4n silver in ptfe sleeve. Rebuilt, put back into system switch on leave to warm up, play cd .......
I don't often get those bloody hell moments but I had on ...so were did the music come from! fast clean dynamic full bass sharpe imaging. That cable was strangling the pre, it must be utter shi*e.
So hears a warning if anyones got any Oehlbach the pure sound , throw it away now do yourself a massive favour!
I was going to have a swap of some of the resistors in the signal path but its now sounding so good I'm going to wait a bit !
Oh didn't I mention what the pre was, silly me! see here.
ebay item number: 5786540808
With the obvious caveats listed above this is a fine pre for the price...[mine was just over half that price !!] so making it excellent value. As to the vendor can't fault him, he even answers emails!
My next mods for this pre will be to loose the front panel and replace with 5mm mirror black perspex and some black knobs of my own design.
