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Hi Romy,

I don't doubt for a moment that there are plenty of people 'who know' who will wax lyrical about the benefits of open loop eq in feedback circuits. There are people 'who know' who will tell me that valve amplifiers cannot be as good as transistor amplifiers and that transmission lines are the only way to get accurate bass from loudspeakers. Unfortunately I have to go to CES next month and will meet dozens of people 'who know' and who will proudly demonstrate their new mousetrap for me. Ultimately we have to base our opinions on what we hear, experience and find agreeable.

My experience with the 834p stemmed from having one at home for about a year soon after it was launched. I did try different types of ECC83 in it which did change it's balance slightly but not enough to make me like it.

My main problem with it was that it lacked clarity. Everything sounded smeared and hazy. It was overly euphonic (tubey) and fundamentally altered the timbre of instruments it set out to reproduce rendering all with the same signature of even order distortion. It also sounded slow and to my ears undynamic. I think it was moderately popular exactly because it sounded tubey and in most applications (ie as a substitute for the inbuilt phono stage in solid state pre-amps and integrated amps) it was preferable to what it replaced. In absolute terms, imho, it is a long way from being any sort of reference. However, it works for you and that's good.

I'm not really concerned whether passive eq no feedback pre-amps have recently become fashionable. I've been using them for 15-20 years. They've always sounded more natural to me. Most commercial implementations that I see are compromised in many ways, the most fundamental being power supply design.

I would like to try to build a equaliser using the Tango EQ600P LCR modules or the S&B equivalent. I heard one once and it did sound very promising.

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