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Audion Silver Night Premier 1.0 preamp and other bargain preamps

Posted by morricab (S) on April 6, 2015 at 13:01:47

Picked up one of these very nice looking tube preamps the other day (mine seems to be a fancy version because it has very nice wooden side cheeks). It was in minty condition and I have always wanted to try this model out.

I hooked it up the other day and it sounds really darn good. I tried it only with cd, which it supposedly only acts as a tube buffer (so zero gain) and compared to my Luminous Audio Axiom passive on my JJ 322 amp it was very similar...but much better. There was no added warmth or smearing to the sound...very transparent but dynamics were far better and soundstage increased in all dimensions. Impressive for a very simple circuit with a relatively simple power supply.

It makes me eager now to try it in my upstairs rig with the vinyl system since I use a MM cartridge and see how it fairs against my standalone phonostage.

Given what I paid for it, it is a really great sounding full function preamplifier. It really steps out of the way in terms of addition of colorations (don't seem to be much in that department) while giving drive and space that the passive seems to subtract out.

I will be getting another preamp soon, the Pure Sound L10, also for a bargain price to see how it stacks up against this super sounding little Audion. The Pure Sound is an altogether different beast with tube rectification and double choke filtering. Plus it has separate transformers for the filament supply and the high voltage supply. It uses only ONE double triode for BOTH channels (so the whole circuit is a single triode) that are transformer coupled. The darn thing has 4 transformers and 2 chokes that are as big as the power transformers.

So, it will be a pure buffer with all solidstate power supply against a transformer coupled anode follower with tube rectified, choke filtered supply.

What got me itching to try to find the best sub $1K preamps was the talk earlier about the Audible Illusions Mod3A. From what I hear now, the Audion is a much better preamp and if the phono holds up it will far outpace Mod3A. The L10 is only a line stage so it is not quite the same.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Kimber Kable

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