Hi Philip,
I am delighted that the Paris is performing well, I really am. The genesis of this amp was interesting.....
I'd seen a thread in DIYaudio on head amps, and followed the discussion for some days where people discussed the intractable difficulties of a MC Head Amp. One of my local friends suggested I have a go at it.
So then began the long sessions in my favorite cafe, musing over scribblings. Pretty soon I had a different approach to the noise issue, based on ground referencing the load instead of the usual power rail referencing. I lashed it up one afternoon and did the measurements; the thing was absolutely brilliant as far as I could tell; but noise is difficult to measure on a CRO. Next I built one for Andy Redwood, and it worked well, and he suggested a German living in Belgium, married to an Australian woman! So Uwe contacted me, we got one out to him, and the rest is history.
I had never considered this a large market, as there were only a very few MC phono setups around. Most people are happy with CD/DVD sources. But I had not factored in the unsatisfactory performance of many of the headamps, particularly transformer versions, that there are out there. The Aspen design is very simple, yet effective, and as you've heard, Phil, the sound stage and noise performance is exceptional. The resolution is ahead of any trafo I've heard too, and thetransformer option is very expensive, so I'm quietly smug about the Paris, it's a good solution to a very tricky problem. It's also a constant current design which operates reliably down to 8V, so it's absolutely ideal for battery power.
Cheers,
Hugh
