I would say that the Leben was the nicest preamp from a build quality perspective. The passive slagel autoformers where great where more gain was not needed, but extremely revealing and could be quite tiring if the source material was not tip-top. I like my Aikido and use it a lot, but the best of the lot and most flexible is probably the inexpensive DIY B1Korg.
Much of my source material (uncompressed CD track rips; no SACDs or vinyl), are 60s pop, r&b and soundtracks, which were often victims of excessively applied compression. And some tracks during multi-vocal passages and when orchestrations get busy sound “congested”; possibly due to poor miking/baffling (??), other acoustical and/or electronic causes. So, while not outright crappy (??), much of my music was certainly less than pristinely recorded and/or mastered, even though almost all were issued by major labels.
Further complicating matters was that I had originally attempted to wed this superb midwoofers with cone HF and MF drivers.
Luckily, I caught that mistake before wasting time and funds. Troy Crowe and I are now deciding among horn drivers to finish this build. The trouble is that no matter which drivers are chosen I might end up not smiling so much while those speakers are playing anything but my tip-top quality CDs. No doubt that’s one reason why so many horn speaker owners prefer SACDs and even less than high quality vinyl over most music released only on CD.
Thus, while I do have some well recorded and well mastered CDs, perhaps the only way to make most of my stuff sound more pleasing is through careful preamp selection-and/or, where possible, tube rolling and “voicing”, as Aikido owner PierreQuiRoule suggested.
To this end, I’ve heard the Aikido described as very neutral sounding. Whether this is true and/or is the same as transparent sounding, while either may be an asset for playing high resolution source material, how would such a preamp feeding my First Watt F4 power amp driving my >94db/m/watt horn speakers present my more sonically troubled CD tracks?
I’m hoping that the Aikido, built with high quality parts and using the right tubes would somehow behave friendlier towards most of my CDs. If yes, please suggest the best caps, even some of more costly Jupiter models. If the values are too big to fit on John Broskie’s updated Noval board, I might elect to ask John and Phil Marchand about the tradeoffs of redesigning the board to accommodate them.
John also mentions here that he suspects tighter bass can be realized with an electrolytic-free power supply.
https://tubecad.com/2018/03/blog0415.htm
Also important to know is which are the tubes known to create the most lifelike imaging and largest sound stage?
But which are the tubes which may be too revealing for my more crappier sounding CDs?
Alternately, is there another preamp which would be altogether better for my situation, such the Nelson Pass B1 Korg Triode, or others?
