Question on ASR Emitter II Exclusive Battery

Suteetat, the ASR Emmiter II does not have a balanced direct input.
The direct input bypasses the input selector and is an RCA connection.

The Emmiter II is comprised of four heavy chassis:
-main amp/preamp
-power supply for left channel
-power supply for right channel
-battery charger/manager and power supply for the preamp section
Those three additional boxes are connected to the back of the amp through heavy silver umbilical cords.

The preamp (line stage, because ther is no interna phono section), input selector (including the line input) and volume control relays are fed by the battery supply. In addition, the preamp is part of the Emmiter's overall feedback/ DC servo loop, therefore there is no way to bypass the preamp.
IMO it is an amazing feat of electronic engineering and one of the 2-3 best amps I have ever owned or auditioned.

Suteetat, I forgot to mention that the XLR input is an option, an extra input board that converts the balanced signal to single-ended, because the preamp's input is single-ended.
I would not hold this against ASR, because the sound quality beats many fully-balanced amps.

Suteetat
Agree with Casouza

Further, this is no ordinary battery operated preamp, far from it. This also applies to the Exclusive Phono.

The preamp section is the icing on the cake with the amplifier, many times you will find with exceptional preamps that by-passing them to go direct to amplifiers would be a sonic mistake.

Suteetat, ff you can run your DAC via RCA into the direkt input, I highly recommend it. I had my Modwright Transporter going into the balanced input and then tried the direkt input via some inexpensive RCA(just to try) and the difference was very dramatic - direkt was MUCH better in my system. Then I got some RCA JPS Aluminata and am in heaven ;-)

Mantis,

You posted in a thread a few months before this one that you were considering an Emitter, heard it, and were glad you hadn't bought one. You obviously changed your mind. Just have another demo that went better? Just curious.

bump