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Romy the Cat wrote:

The idea was very simple: to convert the C filter into RC filter, to employ the Silicon Carbide Schottky rectification diodes that showed themselves so nice in 6-ch Melquiades  and to beef up the preamp with large better caps. Also, since the 6-ch Melquiades  is such a pain in ass to drive I asked Guy to bias the output stage as hot as possible and to drive the output impedance as low as possible. It does not sound like a lot of dramatic changes but to my surprise when I got the preamp today and gave it some listening discover that it has quite a number of clearly auditable improvements of it’s performance. I do not know what made the trick: the 3R of out impedance, the 400.000uF of capacitance or the Silicon Carbide rectification something did. What is interesting that my Placette before was absolutely transparent and now I reposts the “improvements”. It is not an absurd and I will elaborate on it later. Sometime next week I pill pit some thoughts together describing what my new preamp does different in term of sound.

One of the quandary of dynamic are Wilson speakers, not the little Wilson crap like Watt/Poppy 5, 6, 7, Max, Sophia but by Grand Slam and Alexandria. With all their shortcoming of the large speakers then from my point of view defile the common sense of dynamics and they are the only know to me loudspeakers that have dynamic capacity of a good horn installation (bad horn installation demonstrate no dynamics). Another quandary of dynamic is Expressive Technology Transformers. For whatever reason the Expressive magnetics does something absurd it increased the dynamic range and harmonic of a phonostage (at least the 834PT) at the same time. It does not increase a perception of dynamic by squishing harmonics and doing “sharp” (like 99.999% of dynamic-affective audio does). In a contrary the ET magnetics actually prolongs the second harmonic tail and in the same time it increases the speed with which sound runs across the NEW extend dynamic range. Now is the New Placette.

I do feel that New Placette is more dynamic then it older brother. I say “I feel” as the new Placette came at the same time as the new 6-chennal Melquiades. I was not able to driver Melquiades with anything else, except by digital at full volume – too damn loud.  So, Placette in my playback overrides the output capacity of all my front ends that have difficulty to drive Melquiades direct. Therefore it is possible that some of the advanced that I attribute to my new active Placette are derivation of the new 6-chennal Melquiades sound. I did not live with 6-ch Melquiades driver by other preamp, so I have no way to abstract what is coming from New Placette and what is coming from the New Super Miq.  I had a very few days when the 6-ch Milq was ready and then I send the Placette to Guy. Still I feel that I might make some observation about the effect of the new Placettenization.

So, the New Placette is juts more dynamic then old Placette. It is not that old Placette was not. Conducting the “Insertion Test” (Read the “Reviewing preamps by imbeciles” in the linked thread) the old Placette had no influence to sound after the Insertion. The new Placette dos have influence. One of the influences is increase of dynamics with (look like but it is not a final judgments) no impact to harmonics.

Now, it is very important to understand is that I am not a reviewer and I do not conduct the quality assurance of the New Placette. If I was and get paid for my time then the next step would be to bring another New Placette into the game and perform another insertion test with New Placette driving another New Placette. That would indicate if the New Placette in fact increased the dynamic range or it is juts simply repair the deficiency of the not perfect output stages of my front ends component. However, since I do not need to say Truth I might report only what I get – the New Placette does subjectively increases the dynamic range and I care less about the bottom of why and how.

Another amassing characteristic of the New Placette, something that I very seldom see in sound reproduction is that the New Placette is losing bass at low volume very much different than it might be expected. Evan at very very very low listening level the New Placette somehow maintains the reference to bass notes. It was kind of freaky at beginning. The Placette of cause does not implement any correction of equal loudness contour and does not dynamically offset the compression contribution of the driver’s suspension at low volumes (it is arguably what DSET does) but somehow, the New Placette juts has more  and better quality bass at lower volumes. Very very cool!!!

To be continue…

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