[ffawkes]

This is one for audio afficianados - I am wondering what justifies the high price of some pre amps

I was looking at but not listening to Naim pre/power combinations. A Nap 250 power amp comes in around £3.2k and Naim preamps go from £900 up to£7000. If you look at the 'rated' preamps in hi fi magazines many sell for thousands of pounds.

Call me old fashioned but surely all a preamp has to do is select an input device and apply a volume control o it then shove it out to the power amp

so why the high price of some of these beauties? What makes them sound better than their cheaper brethren?

[webbie]

They also have to amplify the signal from a cartridge for the vinyl enthusiasts.This is probably where the expertise and expense lies.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by webbie

They also have to amplify the signal from a cartridge for the vinyl enthusiasts.This is probably where the expertise and expense lies.

No way does anything like that justify the price - but you're not paying for what's inside it, you're paying a HUGE premium for the name and small production numbers.

[Orbitalzone]

I suppose if money is no object but can't help but think that putting that sort of money into decent speakers would probably make more difference than a pre-amp but I'm no expert.

[bobcar]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

No way does anything like that justify the price - but you're not paying for what's inside it, you're paying a HUGE premium for the name and small production numbers.

That's the key, anything that sells in low numbers is always going to be very much more expensive than the big sellers

[bobcar]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Orbitalzone

I suppose if money is no object but can't help but think that putting that sort of money into decent speakers would probably make more difference than a pre-amp but I'm no expert.

I'm sure that's correct, a cheap amp* with top speakers is going to be much better than top amps with medium speakers. Of course since speakers are so subjective the best thing is to listen to them because you may prefer a cheaper pair, that still makes the speakers more important.

*Unless the amp is really crap or underpowered but you can get cheap amps that are not crap. (I'm lumping pre and power amps together for the sake of argument).

[webbie]

Here's some food for thought about a headphone amp...
http://diyaudioprojects.blogspot.co....amplifier.html

[rjb101]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Orbitalzone

I suppose if money is no object but can't help but think that putting that sort of money into decent speakers would probably make more difference than a pre-amp but I'm no expert.

decent speakers

http://www.higherfi.com/spkrlist/speakerlist.htm

[webbie]

If you've got the money for a top amp then you'll have the money for some top speakers. I think it's all about getting the balance right. What that balance is is the tricky bit...that's why you need to audition before purchase.

[Chris Frost]

It's all subjective, but those who care enough and spend enough time listening to music will appreciate what a better piece of electronics does.

Can the prices be justified? Once again it's a matter of personal opinion mixed with experience. For someone like ffawkes then I'd say no, because if you're simply asking "why so much?" about anything really good, be it hi-fi, food, clothes, cameras, vehicles etc, then you're not yet ready to have the discussion.

Reducing any piece equipment to the lowest common denominators based on function is rather a limiting way to look at life. On that basis motor vehicles would have developed very little further than the Model T Ford and I'm sure that 78 records might still be in fashion too.

[jjne]

A preamp's job is not just as a volume control and selector; it also needs to buffer the signal such that the impedance is correct having sorted the volume problem out.

However, this can easily be done with a single op-amp, or valve if you're that way inclined (and there's no particular reason why a valve amp should be massively more expensive than an op-amp based one.

Chinese manufacturers are very good at stealing the designs of the high-end guys and releasing identical circuits for next to nothing...

Bottom line is, I've never seen a pre-amp circuit that would cost more than £50 to copy and build.

[ffawkes]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris Frost

...those who care enough and spend enough time listening to music will appreciate what a better piece of electronics does.

if you're simply asking "why so much?" about anything really good, be it hi-fi, food, clothes, cameras, vehicles etc, then you're not yet ready to have the discussion. .

Far from it, I have always bought my audio stuff based on how it sounds and I have a good ear that's able to distinguish between the sound offered by different bits of kit. And it is generally true that you get what you pay for (I have heard some exceptions, one being the now discontinued Audiolab 8000a integrated which at 500 quid soundd fantastic and even had a phono stage built in)

nevertheless I was (and still am) unsure what can justify thousands for a preamp that is esentially a volume control although jjne reckons it is more than that.

webbie - re your point about balancing the phono input from a cartridge, the funny thing is that most if not all the really expensive preamps don't have a phono stage so you'll have to fork out for a separate phono stage as well

[jjne]

Take apart any integrated amplifier.

The volume control/preamp stage will have one or two op-amps, for the reasons mentioned above.

Even the cheapest of the cheap, such as the Lepai TA2020 (£12 -- but still pretty decent considering) has such a circuit.

If a £12 amp has an active preamp, why do you suppose that this isn't necessary? Surely the cheap design would omit anything unnecessary?

[Nigel Goodwin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ffawkes

nevertheless I was (and still am) unsure what can justify thousands for a preamp that is esentially a volume control although jjne reckons it is more than that.

Nothing justifies it, it's a massive profit margin just because they can, some components may be higher quality, but as jjne has pointed out you would be hard pushed to spend more than £50 on the components of any preamp.

Essentially it's a 'designer label', if people will spend £100+ on a quids worth of trainers just because they say Nike on them, then they will spend £3000 on £100 worth of preamp.

And while jjne quite rightly says they may be some buffering in the preamp, it's VERY, VERY simple to design a high quality line-level buffer that's not going to affect the found.

It's not like they even have tone controls or filters - check the old Quad preamps - you could match the preamps for specific PU's, and they had various tone controls and filters, FAR more complicated than modern day preamps.

[jjne]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NE5532-vol...item336c3ee333

This is an implementation of a standard preamp design I've seen in quite a lot of Japanese and British amps. It's as good as the vast majority of preamps on the market, and costs £7.99 delivered. I have run one of these against the pre-amp in a £700 integrated I own (it has pre-out and in so you can bypass the internal one) and to be perfectly honest I couldn't tell the difference. Noise is negligible, distortion is negligible, circuit could probably do with a tone bypass but that's my only complaint.

I have found one or two valve-based preamps to subjectively sound smoother but even these are around £20-30 max, and tend to be slightly noisy.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jjne

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NE5532-vol...item336c3ee333

This is an implementation of a standard preamp design I've seen in quite a lot of Japanese and British amps. It's as good as the vast majority of preamps on the market, and costs £7.99 delivered. I have run one of these against the pre-amp in a £700 integrated I own (it has pre-out and in so you can bypass the internal one) and to be perfectly honest I couldn't tell the difference. Noise is negligible, distortion is negligible, circuit could probably do with a tone bypass but that's my only complaint.

I have found one or two valve-based preamps to subjectively sound smoother but even these are around £20-30 max, and tend to be slightly noisy.

I'd be more impressed with the kit if it didn't say you have to WELD the components yourself

As we've said all along, there's nothing expensive or complicated in a preamp - and that one looks perfectly fine. For that price I wouldn't consider buiulding my own, I'd just buy the kit.

[2Bdecided]

When people claim that something sounds better than something else, ask them to identify which is which in a "blind" test.

HiFi magazines rarely run blind tests. The results would really upset their advertisers!

Cheers,
David.

[jjne]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

I'd be more impressed with the kit if it didn't say you have to WELD the components yourself

As we've said all along, there's nothing expensive or complicated in a preamp - and that one looks perfectly fine. For that price I wouldn't consider buiulding my own, I'd just buy the kit.

Bwahahahaha!

Agreed re the lack of complexity. At its simplest a preamp is nothing more than a single op-amp plus a couple of resistors and caps.

The one above is actually quite feature-rich, having as it does 10dB gain, bass, treble and balance controls and fully-regulated power on-board. This actually makes it better in some respects than a lot of amps, as the power is isolated, and the regs are massively overpowered for the circuit (some amps I've seen just rectify and smooth the AC input and throw it straight across to the opamp -- and that's not only the cheap ones!).

When I've done bits and pieces of (amateur) audio design, one thing I've learned is that overprovisioning power, and isolating each section from the next, is never a bad thing when it comes to keeping distortion down. But you often see this ignored on professional designs.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jjne

When I've done bits and pieces of (amateur) audio design, one thing I've learned is that overprovisioning power, and isolating each section from the next, is never a bad thing when it comes to keeping distortion down. But you often see this ignored on professional designs.

You also need to consider the source of what you're listening to - mostly it will already have been through multiple hundreds of opamps and electrolytic capacitors in the recording process - so there seems little reason to be obsessive about avoiding those in the preamp and poweramp.

[jjne]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

You also need to consider the source of what you're listening to - mostly it will already have been through multiple hundreds of opamps and electrolytic capacitors in the recording process - so there seems little reason to be obsessive about avoiding those in the preamp and poweramp.

Very fair comment -- to the point where such material played on a good system ends up just sounding a mess (this is often done deliberately).

i do see some worth in keeping things simple though -- but that should reduce the cost of manufacture, not increase it.

The other one I just don't get is the obsession with "top quality" electrolytics, especially around the power supply. The purpose of a smoothing capacitor is to smooth. That's it. It's either got the capacity or it doesn't. A cheap 10,000uF cap is likely to do a better job than a 5,000uF expensive gold-plated doofer. Anything else is just voodoo.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jjne

i do see some worth in keeping things simple though -- but that should reduce the cost of manufacture, not increase it.

It certainly should - but that doesn't apply to designer labels, which bear no relation to the manufacturing cost.

[webbie]

Not entirely true - we all know about the cheap caps in Thonson sky HD box.

[Orbitalzone]

It's not the same, those caps were just crap and failed prematurely..... just google badcaps and you'll see that there were millions of these damned cheap, nasty and poorly made caps released onto the world that failed.

Most caps work and last years and years - but then there's the caps that were made incorrectly with the electrolytic forumula being wrong.

[jjne]

Quote:

Originally Posted by webbie

Not entirely true - we all know about the cheap caps in Thonson sky HD box.

I was referring to sound quality -- I know only too well the reliability issues surrounding cheap Taiwanese caps.

[webbie]

There's still more to a power supply cap than just its capacity. I'm no expert but there's its esr, and ripple current rating at least that has to be taken into account.