In Reply to: Re: The Ultrapath Linestage on the Electra Print site posted by EuropaChris on December 26, 2000 at 07:06:09:
But this ain't a Welborne Labs product, but rather a distant transformer cousin to the Moondogs and Laurels. I've also had some gain-related oddities with my Lowther horns. There are things you can do, if you haven't already, to lowther the gain a bit. Try putting resistance in series with the input on your preamp -- I use 10K pots with a 100k resistor on each volume control (signal input lug). If you are using 100K or 250k pots with a high gain preamp and a sensitive input voltage on your amp/s... AND...have sensitive, high impedance (12 + ohms) speakers -- you will probably have hair-trigger volume controls. If you don't have long interconnect runs, you could also try going straight from your source to your amps, using the variable output jacks on your CD player (if you have one). Most players are very easily able to 'drive' a modest length of cable to power amp/s. And you simplify your system (to me that's a positive thing). I used a homemade passive preamp in my system (using the fixed output from my CD player)for over a year, and it worked well. Changing our furnishings around, though, has required interconnects of 30 feet, which is overcome by using an active gain stage. This preamp is capable of much greater output than is needed for the couple or so volts input on my Moondogs, and I have no squashing of dynamics or high frequency loss due to the filtering effects of increased cable capacitance.Erik
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