Yes, the Active Placette would drive headphone, still I do not like the sound. I get way more proper sound when Placette driver my “big” system then what is drivers headphone. I use headphone quite aggressively but mostly for “technical listening” (like fine-dial the antenna attenuation to get better noise on FM). Placette does to headphone very good “quality” but it is very amusical quality. The HF-MF range with Placette into headphones is brilliant but it is not supported by proper harmonics – so who need that “brilliant midrange”. There is not bass at all and the lower MF range is very-very sharp. The upperbass is insultingly fast and overly round – very unpleasant. It very much reminding the sound of Kharma-Magico, only with even more ridicules extreme.

I think the truth is the Placette has no power to drive this thing, even I asked Guy to bias the out transistor as hot as heatsinks might handle but I think it did not help and my Placette still has no power to drive my 75R headphone. Saying it I feel that the headphone jack is very useful feature on Placette – extremely convent and very useful. Juts I feel that Placette’s headphones should be used for no other purpose then for monitoring.

Surely Placette has no of the above quality what it driver the higher impedance. I usually use double-load test to found out if the output stage with an acceptable load.  To simplify for you might do the following: driver big system with Placette and get the reverence how it sounds. When connect the headphone (not via the Placette jack and it will mute the main system’s output). Pay attention if the sound of your main playback changes. In my case it goes to toilet right the way. That is the sign that the amp should not drive the given load. My rule is that an amp should be able to drive with no sonic impact at least the half impedance.

I have to note though that I use top of the line and the near-bottom of the line Audiotechnica headphones, with the near-bottom of the line being my reference headphones (ATH-M40fs) . The Placette’s Guy disagrees with my findings about the Placette’s headphone sound. He feels that Placette sound very fine with headphones. He uses Sennheiser 650. I did not try any other headphones besides those that I already have.

That is truly great and IO would like to express one more time my esteem to active Placette preamp.

I play with 3 tuners and multiple stereo decoder options trying to gig out the minute differences and aspect of sound of those units. It is a pure anal retentive nose picking as far as I concern but I would like to settle it once and do not return to this subject again.  So doing the “comparing” of 3 tuners and multiple output stages with Placette is just a pure pleasure.

Placette overrides the different output impedance of different tuners and allows to instantaneously switching from one tuner to other via a remote control. The most important is that Placette offers something that I never seen in any other preamp s that I owned – it has absolutely identical sound from it’s all 11 inputs. This confidence that my preamp will not screw up is so imperative in my experiments that I can hardly stress it’s significance.

Rony,

Actually I did try to drive Melquiades from different source. My old tube buffer, my phonostage and any other not DC-coupled source were not able to drive it. The 6-ch Melquiades is pain in as to drive. It has around 5K input impedance and the impedance is active like hell – I have 6 filters sitting right from input. As soon I put any voltage dividers before the amps then all Sound got “dropped”. The only souses that were able to drive Milq were the DC-could Bidat, Pacific and Lavry. They all around 40R output impedance that is comparable to 11R output impedance of Placette.

It is interesting that you have such a positive result with a custom made tube preamp. I very much doubt that it might have fuller and deeper bass and any advanced in dynamics.  I think if your type preamp does not do any unintentional EQ (many of them do) and if it has advantage over Placette in bass and dymick then it might indicate some kind of bug in playback or in evaluation.  I do not treat Placette as some kind of references but from what I know the properly working Placette shall not loss to in bass and dymick to anything. What is your source that you use to drive Placette or your custom tube preamp? It your sourced is a powerful enough to drive you amps directly then try to do the bypass test and compare how your tube preamp and Placette compare not against each other but against a front-end output and direct bypass. Let discard the “haze across the entire spectrum” and the “emotional attachment” and juts to pay attention to what happen with bass and domains.

RonyWeissman wrote:

Romy, would you say that placette is especially sensitive to electricity to function at it's best(sensitive in relation to other equipment I mean)? My unit is 110v and I am in 220v world, so I am using a step-down transformer on the unit.  I have had very good results using this step-down with other equipment so the problem is not the quality of the transformer.

Well, this is a very complicated question, so complicated that I do not have not only a definitive answer but even a definite opinion on the subject. Let talk about it.

I have been using Placette for a while and was trying to answer the question how the electricity that powers the output buffer affects sound. In some cased I have seen that it affects hugely and other case it was less affective. The reason for this I think that any given days the reason why the electricity sound bad is changes day by day, location by location etc. For instance a have in my closet an army of regenerators, isolation transformers, filters, resonator filters etc. When electricity was bad I was trying to use them on separate elements of on the selected group elements. In some case I had truly phenomenal success. For instance when electricity has a very bad day and you take some kind isolation transformer or regenerator, connect it to you phonostage or to your Placette and have a fantastic improvement then you presume that your phonostage or your Placette is very sensitive to electricity. However, the next day the sound turn bad and the location of your isolation transformer or regenerator are not effective anymore. Even worse: you have better elective day and you realizes that your isolation transformer or regenerator sound words then the phonostage or Placette driver directly from your walls. I have what I described above many-many-many-many times and I even had a Excel spreadsheet where I was trying to mark the results and to catch a patter. I was not able to as it was totally random pain in ass behavior – at least at my location.

A couple years back I asked Guy to beef up the Placette’s Power supplies. I do not remember exactly what we did, I think we put Schottky diodes in there and big ass caps. If I am not mistaken we pout in Placette 4 by 220.000uF capacious – the biggest that I was able to find for the size that could fit in the box. I feel it did affect the sensitive of my Placette to electricity. It did not resolve the problem but it changed the non-existing patter to have slightly better odds against electricity. Then I went with APS that have changed my ways of dealing with electricity. The APS has its own perks, which is not the subject of this thread, but the odds with APSed Placette are way in different coordinate scale.

I do not know what the general situation with electricity in your place. Hey, it is even a different continent, not only the different country! Whatever you it looks like you have two series transformers in there – one from 220V to 120V and another is the Placette’s internal from 120V to 12V.  First of all I think that Placette’s internal transformer might have two primaries and you can switch them. In any case, the internal transformer that Placette uses is very small and very common- it shall not be hard to replace them to 220V – those blue PC-mount transformers are $25 each and shall be widely available. If you keep the Placette as it as has a separate step down then it might be a good idea to make the step down transformer as an isolator transformer, implementing in there the double Faraday shields and etc. It might be effective but there is a bitch in this – you will not be able to recognize when your isolator works well when it screw up sound. I would have a few steps down of deferent type and would see what works and if the effectiveness of them will wary.

Probably Guy himself will be the best person to evaluate what you might do but there is a problem in Guy’s advice.  I have no problem with Guy listening expertise but when I was looking at Google map then looked like Guy’s house is located right next to a large Idaho mountain massive.  The whole town of Boise where Guy lives is located between Boise Mountains and Owyhee Mountains – that is beautiful rural district that has not a lot of people in there and not a lot of industrial polluters.  Not to mention that Idaho and the neighboring states of East Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Montana and Wyoming are not the most populated to begin with. Look at the shot from the space:

http://members.cox.net/wmckinney1/wallpapr/USatNight.jpg

….there is not a lot light density where Guy lives. So, I might only presume that the electricity situation in Guy’s home is VERY different from the downtown of Boston or downtown of Paris. 

Steradian,

I do not remember how much input impedance of my Placette is. I think I did ask to make it higher then 18K but I do not remember now, can measure if I were home…. In most of the cases the 18K is plenty but it very easily could be increased to any value one might wish. I do feel that 30K-50K is more reasonable number then 18K and it would also all those high-impedance tube front-ends with capacitance coupling to drive the preamp more confidently.