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Need passive aggressive advice

Hello
To scratch an itch of mine I purchased a preowned Placette passive device and now I'm hooked!
Passives are very system dependent as we all know but I'm stoked on what its doing, or should I say, not doing in my Horn/300B system,
Since I can't leave well enough alone, I'm looking at more "modern" passive designs and have narrowed it down to three of them.
1) latest from Tortuga
2) " The Truth" from the Horn Shoppe
3) Axiom with Walker mods
All with remote. A MUST for me.
I'm assuming that they will all surpass the vishay placette in transparency. ASSUMING.

Appreciate any and all suggestions/comments/alternatives.

Thanks for your time

Emil




emil
wolf_garcia
6,600 posts
 
I recently replaced my preamp with a new Schiit Freya that has 3 options: Passive, FET, and tube. The passive and FET sound alike (with short cables anyway), the tube stage has so much more gain it's a hard comparison, but the tubes seem to have more detail or at least more interesting tone for my tastes. Note that although the passive and FET modes have to be cranked up for my little SE amp to work, they do sound very good.
mikhaelkuz
56 posts
 
That's a very interesting discussion for me, as I now also in this ""passive" dilemma, which made worse by necessety of HT bypass. I am not an Electrical Engineer, but conversation with some passive Pre makers reveals that they may have difficulties of implementing such very simple on the surface feature.
If Freya had a I bypass it already will be in my rack )), I love an ability to switch options and play.
wolf_garcia
6,600 posts
 
What’s a (an) "I bypass?"
mikhaelkuz
56 posts
 
Sorry, HT bypass )) One hand in a sling and typing is difficult ))
larryi
3,716 posts
 

I use to have the Placette active linestage (it had a unity gain buffer that made it active).  I heard it against the passive and I liked the active version more because it sounded more dynamic. 

I've also heard a light dependent resistor-based passive that was operated by remote control.  It was pretty good sounding, although, it was bettered by a tube-based active in a mini shootout conducted by a friend.

The one that has me curious is the remotely controlled autoformer passive made by Dave Slagle.  I like transformer-based passives, but, most have too few volume steps and are not remote controllable.  Slagle's unit has many small steps, remote control and a balance control.  I believe he sells his unit through a company called MyEmia.  I've heard systems he put together for shows that sounded quite good, but, I haven't actually tried one in my system.

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