Last Friday Bruce came to my house to have a small shootout between his Odyssey tempest and my pretty highly modified Bottlehead Foreplay preamp (
http://didnt.doit.wisc.edu/audio/foreplay/foreplay.html). Since I moved from an SS pre (vintage Yamaha C85) to tubes, I figured there was no way an SS pre could deliver the smoothness and expansive sound stage that I am getting from the Foreplay. All the talk about tube gear by others who have moved that way would support that there's probably no way that a $1000 pre like the Tempest would come close to the Foreplay in these particular qualities. On top of that, Bruce's Tempest wasn't even fully broken in yet...
Bruce opened up the Tempest before we started listening, and there was a Torroid transformer in there that's about the size of what some power amps use these days
- definitely enough for a pre-amp.
Looking at the Alps volume pot (motorized for the remote control option) I already started thinking that "hey, there's no way this thing will match my Foreplay, given I have a stepped attenuator with Vishay S102 boutique resistors in there, which at least in my recent preamp upgrades have made a huge difference in imaging and detail resolution.
So we listened to the Foreplay first - Telefunken tubes nicely warmed up - and a sound stage going well beyond the edge of my Magnepan speakers. After a while, we found a way to cram the Tempest into my cheap rack, placed it on nothing but a piece of MDF and an inner tube to isolate it from the ringing of the metal racks. Running the ICs from my CD player into the wrong inputs (AUX - never been used before), we listened only for a few minutes before Bruce realized that there has never been any burn-in on those inputs. So we swapped it to what he has been using, and tried again. Harshness was gone - sooooo gone! It was suddenly everything the Foreplay was: smooth, detailed, huuuuge sound stage, and there was more: bass - even more than what I have been tweaking from my Foreplay after extensive power supply tweaks and capacitor upgrades. The Tempest clearly kicked the Foreplay's butt in the low frequency range. It wasn't "boomy" - just plenty of control all the way down to the lowest ranges. We ran a few very bass heavy tracks, and even though I wasn't even sitting in the sweet spot at that time, I was able to tell that there was considerably more "umpf" in the low range than what I have been able to wring from the Foreplay design.
Detail and soundstage were just as good as with the tube pre. I was extremely impressed. Now, I know the power supply in my Foreplay is the weak link, and there's a version No 02 on the drawing board waiting for a few cold winter nights to be soldered together, but I am starting to think that I may save myself a lot of hassle (and future tube replacement costs), by switching to the Tempest. Replacing that Alps pot with a high grade stepped attenuator may even elevate it into a class above of it's current performance level, since I know from my tube upgrades how much a high grade shunt stepped attenuator can do to the quality of the signal going into the preamp. I suppose I can start saving for a Tempest now, tweak it a little and see where things will go from there. Clearly, the Tempest is a great value, even without tweaks, given that a Foreplay built up like the one I have is frequently compared to $3000 tube gear with a brand name on the fancier case...
I'm posting this here, because I know if I go out on the Bottlehead forum, they'll call me a heretic
The Tempest clearly doens't get enough exposure on the forums - it definitely is as great a value as the Mono Xtremes (which we put to good use last Friday).
PS - disclaimer: maybe it was just due to the German beer and the high-fat Bratwurst diet that things sounded to us that way
