vmps, art d/io, & boldercables.com

hi bob, i in no way meant to slight your product or your efforts - i'd love to hear the blowtorch. preamps & amps (especially preamps, imo), are items that *can* be made to sound great w/lotsa time & money thrown at them... of course, it's way beyond my budget, & my comment was made cuz i really *do* think my preamp (not exactly cheap at its original retail of $4600), *is* an outstanding-sounding preamp, sonically competitive w/anything *i've* ever heard. of course, i have not had the opportunity to audition competition in my rig, where it matters most...

regards, doug s.

btw, i can't disagree w/you about your opinions of the cost of digital electronics... :>)

Well, well, well:

I've been listening to my DI/O all morning, freshly modified by Bolder Cable Company and I have to say that I am floored by how good this DAC sounds. There is no question in my mind that it easily outmaneuvers my ModWright/Perpetual Tech P-3A. I am amazed at the purity of the treble, its delicacy, and fine focus. The bass also surprised me. It has clearly the most natural and detailed bottom end that I've heard from any DAC in my system. And the midrange is less opaque and oh-so-transparent. The DI/O, with Wayne's mods is clearly a winner -- and the thing is not even broken in.

I heard so much more detail from almost every cut in Fionna Apple's "When the Pawn" CD, that although I have played this recording countless times, it was almost like I was hearing it for the first time. A drum/percussion passage toward the end of her song "Limp" amazed me by how dynamic and true to life it was (very high slam factor). Later I put on the "O Brother Where Art Thou?" soundtrack and almost jumped out of my skin at the start of "Po Lazarus" because the sound of the prisoners cracking rocks in the opening was THAT STARTLING!

Happy Listening!

Sedond, no offense taken whatsoever as we built the preamp to see how far we could take it and never expected to do much more than build a few units and have something for reference use the rest of the CTC partner's lives.....Just finishing up the big JC-1 amps for Parasound and they mentioned that they want a matching preamp, but it is going to be tough to make an easy to build and cost effective preamp for them....It will happen this next year I imagine.....Back to Art it is possible to spend a lot of money on digital parts as I specified in the 1.5 rev to the Entec Number Cruncher as teflon caps don't some cheap nor do Muse caps, Schottky diodes, shunt regulators or Vishay resistors....You can run the bill up pretty high if you aren't careful and obtain better performance and finally come to a stopping point years down the way, but the point is the digital circuit is exactly the same electrically and most DAC chips just don't cost much these days.....

Bob Crump,
Thank you for having a sense of humor.
I hope you sell more preamps than you expect and maybe even can license your technology to a larger producer so it will eventually "trickle down" to more of us. The hi end industry needs people like you as well as those few who can afford to buy your products at list price in order for the rest of us to enjoy the level of sound reproduction we do.

I wasn't kidding as we really don't want to build many of the preamps as they are a real pain to build.....Parasound wants to hire CTC to do a preamp and we'll do the best we can, but it will need to be easy to build and probably need to be remote operated.....It will likely be ready in a year or so.....Oh, for those that wonder where I have squandered the profits from CTC we finally broke even at ten units and are now building Nos 14 & 15 for a couple of lucky individuals....We sure aren't doing this for the money even at the pricing we have required........