Occams post from Rave...
"nstructions.... We don need to steeek'n instuctions.
The equipment comparisons were between Levy's BAT, and Lonewolf's loaned Modwright and touring SAS 10A. All were quite impressive. The BAT provided deep bass (a bit plummier than the others) with the most extended treble. Its hard to describe a specific component when you're not familiar with all the other components. The Modwright is simply the Modwright.... presenting that overall cohesive picture that I hear whenever its slotted in. The SAS changed radically for the better after 20 minutes of warm up, becoming far clearer and resolving. But in Levy's system, from the upper midrange through the treble, it was a bit hot for my liking, simply not my cuppa.... We'd taken the SAS out of the system, but after remembering the instructions, we flipped that 'tone' toggle from 'neutral' to 'darker', slotter her back in, and voila!!! a radical change. My previous subjective issues with the SAS disappeared. Its not a tone switch, its a 'new preamp' switch, changing far more that just the frequency spectrum. Most notably, I found that the soundstage grew substantially, filling in and becoming far more solid. I can't think of one metric where from my subjective view, in Levy's particular sytem, that I didn't find this toggled preamp prefferable to the very same pre, but a different toggle setting. Frankly, with my limited exposure, I don't know if I could distinguish between the SAS and the ModWright. A fair comparison and evaluation really would require longer term listening and thorough evaluation of all the easily customizable settings on the SAS. And we totally forgot about the SAS's AC polarity switch. Well, at least we had about a 50:50 chance of hearing the AC polarity switch set correctly.
The only conclusion I could draw was that the BAT, MW and SAS are all excellent preamps. A rave isn't the quitest of environments. New Yawkas like to talk and eat, and drink..... but all of those preamps are excellent which merit a longer term (or at least not as distracting an environment) evaluation.
And dang Steve to heck. His interconnects are kickass, clearly stomping my own interconnects that I'd previously been quite happy with. I stole them from the Rave and won't give them back to Loanwolf until Wed.
FWIW.
Many thank to Levy and his gracious wife for hosting such a collection of hooligans. And especially to his son for allowing us to ruin his Saturday.
Many thanks,
RockEmSockEmOccam "
