Hi people, this is my first post in this forum, no personal experiences yet to share on the TVC, because I do not have one at the moment... just ordered the balanced version. I am trusting all the positive opinions, and the fact thas this design is just technically "sweet". You know, all preamps deal with "low level" signals: low voltage, low amperage, and the musical information flows thru variations in the amplitude of this electrical current. The nemesis of voltage is impedance. If you control the voltage/amplitude of this delicate signal flow with resistive elements, as in traditional potentiometers, it seems clear that you are truncating the signal itself. The "brakes" that you apply this way afect the whole electrical current, energy is lost in the process so it seems obvious that the signal before the potentiometer is not the same after it. It is like having a flow of water from a 10 cm pipe and tying to routing it to a series of pipes from 10 to 1 cm. It is not possible without throwing away more and more water with each smaller pipe. The impedance of the smaller pipes is too high, so what you do is reduce the flow to fit. You have to throw away water. Yes, you still reveive water, but a lot less compared to the original flow, and a low volume means a small pipe, you know. In this analogy, what the TVC does is the opposite: it "changes" the diameter of the smaller pipes by lowering the impedance and increasing the current as the volume goes lower. In other words, you receive more or less the same amount of "water" in any setting, since the decreasing voltage is compensated proportionally by higher current and lower impedance. Well, at least theoretically sounds good, and signal integity should be superior with a TVC. It would be nice to see some graphs of signal loss before/after resistive elements, versus the TVC.
