We have had a number of inquiries with regards to overall peripheral hardware that we recommend for our speakers. Since we could not possibly audition for ourselves even a fraction of the available products, we would rather offer everyone some general guidlines based on our experience and philosophy.
To begin, the simplest summary we can think of is the "straight wire with gain" concept. It is a purist approach that really means that less is more. The fewer components that you can place between the speakers the better. This is pretty obvious and I doubt anybody tries to add more equipment than necessary to their system. What we mean is that if you have a source (cd player, etc) that has sufficient voltage output to drive your power amplifier into clipping, then you don't really need an active gain stage or preamp. Our experience has shown that a passive preamp or other attenuation device that is of resonable quality should suffice. It runs the least risk of adding unwanted artifacts.
If your needs require an active preamp for switching multiple sources or whatever, then try to find one that offers the lowest distortion. The Timepiece will reveal the slightest coloring of the signal. Also, try to find a unit that offers the highest channel seperation rating possible. Greater than 90dB is good for this spec. This is an often overlooked performance requirement and it is vital to the reproduction of soundstage and imaging.
There is no preferance here with regards to tube or solid-state designs. If you do select a tube unit be sure to pay extra attention to the channel separation issue. It is not that there is anything whatsoever inherently inferior with tube preamps, it's just that they present an extra challange to the designer with regards to this spec due to their higher internal impedances and consequently, their sensitivity to stray signals. If a stray signal is from somewhere other than the input signal, then we call that noise (transformer hum, etc.) If it come from the opposite channel we call that crosstalk and crosstalk is inversely related to channel seperation.
The final suggestion for the power amp is the same for the preamp. Simply try to find the highest powered unit that fits within your budget while not sacrificing low distortion and musicality. Since the Timepiece is of lower sensitivity, higher power will probably provide more enjoyment than a low powered unit of esoteric design and high cost.
As should go without saying, the sound of your system will be no better than the signal you feed it. So try to find the best front end unit (CD, etc.) that you can afford and do not overlook interconnects as the Timepiece will flesh out the best and worst of them. It has been shown that cable differences are clearly audible on them.
We hope this helps and if anyone has any questions please feel free to post. Suggestions and personal experiences are all welcome as well. Have fun all and hope to hear from you.
Take care,
-Bob
