Passive/Active preamps: pros and cons....


New to preamps...what are the advantages/disadvantages of passive or active designs? I will be only connecting one source (CD) to the pre...any thoughts? passive/active switch like the highly reviewed Adcom piece? any others come to mind? Also...in an active design...how much emphasis does the pre have in regard to the main amp signal?
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Showing 1 response by electroid

If you are a candidate for a passive then by all means get one. If your CDP has enough output at a low impedence and your amp is sensative with a high input impedence it should be fine. I connected my CDP direct to my amp and it has too much output and would have overdriven my amp on all CD's (no two CD's are recorded at the same level) What this means is my former active tube preamp (now retired) was really acting as an attenuator. Everything got better with it out of the loop. It was a very nice modded CJ pre. My CDP is also nice an MF Trivista which has a very hefty low impedence output. In my opnion many CD players do not qualify for passives. Try connecting yours to your amp direct first and see. Have a CD that starts out quiet and your remote in hand ready to push the stop button if it overdrives your amp. If it does not overdrive at anytime and say only produces a moderate volume level you are not a candidate for a passive. I use the Placette and love it. It sounds no different than with my CDP connected directly. I reburned some CD's @ -10db to do lengthy testing before switching to passive. I like Placette and the company is really great. I have tried a few other passives and did not like them as well. I would like to try a Bent which is TX-102 transformer based compared to Placette's Vishay resistor ladder. I think I would not like the high end but am open to anyone who wants to lend me theirs for evaluation. The Bent and other transformer based passives actually have about 6db gain, so I have read, the TX-102 is a step up X-former. Good luck!

ET