HiFi Subjectivist ¦ Audio Forum ¦ NVA User Group

I got into a bit of a debate when talking about a Radford STA25 I was thinking of buying.

My first proper Hifi amp was a freshly rebuilt Leak Stereo 20 in 1991. I tried it with a few powered pre amps, before settling on a Mark Levinson Cello fully passive Pre amplifier (which I stupidly sold in 2008, along with the Leak).

I find I like the purity of the music with a passive Pre amplifier, and I find that powered pre amps steal something from the signal, and ad compression and mid bumps to artificially add energy to the music. To me powered pre amps can sound good, just not in my Hifi systems.

The person I was chatting with insisted that passive Pre amps can sound flat and boring, and while detailed, lack the urgency and life a power pre amp brings.

Neither of us will likely ever shift from our respective positions on the matter.

What are your thoughts on the subject? I’m guess, as this is NVA, ans NVA are not big on selling powered pre amps, that opinion will likely line up with mine.

But, am I mad? Am I missing the joy of powered Pre amps (with valve power amps)?
Have I just not heard a good one? Unlikely, I’ve had all sorts of expensive pre-amps in my setup back in the 90’s, and still preferred the fully passive with stepped attenuators.

I’ve not used a powered Pre amp in the last 15 years, so maybe I’m missing out on something.

Thoughts?

Cheers

Marlin


BTW, I recently bought another expertly rebuilt Leak Stereo 20, now running that with a passive Pre amp, sounds mega.

There isn't any universal answer to the question of passive or active. It depends. If your amplifier has sufficient gain AND a benign input impedance AND doesn't mind it's source impedance varying AND there isn't a lot of capacitance between the volume control and the input device, then a passive will work best. These conditions aren't hard to satisfy, but miss one of them and a buffer of some kind is best. An optimised emitter/cathode/source follower circuit can be sonically invisible IME.

I am with John on this one. My P90 SA was truly wonderful in my NVA system but once I broke the chain so to speak the synergy was never quite as good and now I am using a Schiit Freya + which gets rave reviews but I was not happy with until I spent £300 on new capacitors and another £200ish on fancy tubes. Now I like it a lot but as always it's "horses for courses"
Fwiw whilst my Freya was being modified I lent a very expensive passive pre amp and after the initial this is different, this is good moment I grew to think my P90 SA sounded better at less than a quarter of the price.