Hello Danny,
There has been was an active thread about the jumper cable connection for the mini stratas, and which way to connect is better, using the jumper cable from the speaker terminals to the "high level speaker inputs" (as labeled on the back of the speaker), or running a rca interconnect from the preamp to the low level input connectors on the back of the mini strata. Figured why not ask the speaker designer for his take on the subject. I would link to the tread, but currently av123 forums are down.
Someone posted a link to another discussion thread on this subject where Mark S. commented with a quick one line reply saying, when available from the preamp, the line level inputs are always the superior connection for the mini strata, no explanation was given...though I read some speculation about taking out an extra cross over or something to that effect.
I decided to test this out myself to see if I would see any change in sound, expecting to see the difference in the bass/low end if any at all. Well I did hear a difference, but it was not where I expected it, the most pronounced change was in the high end. The sound using the line level inputs, instead of the jumper cable from the speaker terminals, showed a very noticeable degradation in the high end. Things just seemed to be less detailed and defined. It is really there in the way a guitarist's fingers sound when moving along guitar strings, when a trumpet goes for the very high note, or with some cymbals. Using the jumper connection you hear clear lifelike sounds for these things, whereas with the line level inputs they are kind of blended together, and some times will even sound mildly distorted.
My setup is Squeezebox 3 --> Paradisea Tube Dac --> Promitheus Rev4 TVC Passive pre --> Odyssey Mono Extreme SEs --> Mini Strata
I recently (10 days ago) upgraded all the interconnects and speaker wire (as the next step in incremental upgrades for a pair of pre-ordered LS9's) from what I thought are very good budget Blue Jean cables to the following group of silver type cables sold from a company in Taiwan:
One Silver Plated OFC Speaker Cable 3m 2x2 300b 12ax7 6sn7, Two pr 1m Pure Silver Analog Interconnects e88cc 5842 kt88 6l6, One XLR Balanced Pure Silver Analog Interconnect el34 300b (1.5M instead of 1M),and One Silver Coaxial Digital Interconnect DAC.
Note in addition to using silver, the new cables are definitely thicker, and insulated better than the regular coax type cover used on the Blue Jean cables. After the cable upgrade it was almost like I had a completely different pr. of speakers. I had thought the Mini stratas sounded great before the new cables, but now the sound has improved quite a bit. Never was much of a "cable guy", figured if there would be any improvement, it would probably be minor, not the case in my setup with the mini stratas.
O.k. enough of the background, now the questions:
Can you explain what, if any, differences using the jumper cable vs. low level inputs has on the way the signal is processed by the mini stratas, and do you think there is a clear advantage of using one over the other.
Maybe you will answer this in the first question, but is the signal from the preamp to line level inputs also being used for the high end? I thought since it was being fed to the plate amp, then the strata would only be using it for the low end for the powered woofer, and the signal from the amp to the speaker terminals would be crossed/used for the high end. Trying to figure out why the high end is getting effected by change to line level inputs.
The connections from the preamp outs to the strata low level inputs, is about 6ft, and I am using one of the Blue Jean interconnects for this, could the cable be causing the differences. I figured the quality of cable might not be too important with this interconnect, since my assumption (maybe wrong??) was this was going to be for the low end. Your answer to the first two questions might explain why cable quality is important for this connection also. A poster at av123 suggested the passive tvc could be sensitive to the extra cable run to the mini line level inputs, and might not have enough output for a clean signal. Unfortunately I don't have a new interconnect long enough to try for the line level input.
Thanks for any information you can provide, that might help me understand this better.
John
