DarTZeel Preamp

Great read Mike! Thanks for the update. You just made the waiting time that much more painful :-(

What 50 Ohm cables were you using between the preamp and amps?

Mike,thanks for a really interesting,and thought provoking read.This must have taken you a good bit of time to keyboard,yet I LOVED it.Keep the follow up,and comparisons coming.

Best regards.

thanks Fsarc and Sirspeedy, at the moment i am again listening to battery powered vinyl. hubba hubba!!

Janice Ian's 'Breaking Silence' at the moment. imagine that her voice is without all that breathyness (which turns out to be distortion).....it's just music. the transients are naked; without the 'fur' and overhang. it puts a strong pull on you.....it takes all my concentration to type anything. i want to close the laptop, turn down the lights, and groove with Janice.....and i can tell she is looking at me while singing (i don't think she's my type).

Fcarc, i'm using the 50 ohm cables that Herve provided for the ugly duckling (a 50 foot pair, with jumpers for the vertical bi-amping). it looks like about 10 bucks worth of garage sale cable. these are the same ones used at RMAF and last years CES.

i did buy a couple of Radio Shack 50 ohm 12' cables with BNC connectors.....which i used with my Placette (XLR from my switchbox to the Placette and XLR from the Placette to one channel of the darTZeel amps)......i used the BNC to jump from the channel with the XLR input to the other channel. it seemed to sound great.

the 12 footers from Radio Shack were about $17 each. will the Radio Shack BNC's sound as good as Herve's? good question. if i had the right connectors and two longer runs i could find out. according to jtinn Herve has some special machine that makes a proper connection and evidently that is significant.

the first thing i'm doing when i get the new fully functional dart pre is to compare cables; it's hard to imagine anything sounding better than how these BNC 'giant-killers' sound.....but you never know.

I guess the key to the 50 Ohm cables, just as with video and digital cables, is that they are properly terminated a maintain a consistent 50 Ohm impedance from end to end.

Here is one 50 Ohm cable I'll be trying from L-Com- 18 awg solid silver coated copper with 2 silver coated copper braids for shielding. Wide bandwidth and extremely cheap- no loss in trying them.

http://www.l-com.com/jump.jsp?itemID=169&iMainCat=101&iSubCat=37&iSubSubCat=169&itemType=CATE

You are in for another performance level regarding bass and dynamics (among a few other things) once the amps are fully broken in. It's not subtle.

Keep us posted when that moment arrives.

Frank

Mike,please don't forget to post comparisons of the ZYX Univ and Dynavector XV-1s.This would be very interesting to many vinyl fans.Best regards!