Being a new owner of this Dodd preamp, I can certainly agree with the reviewer's conclusion. This piece is a gem, PERIOD.
I've been used to putting up the "revealing nature" of my setup, which consists of Tact preamp into Moscode 401HR into Salk HT3 speakers. I have long accepted that my system sounds absolutely fantastic on good recordings but intolerable on bad recordings. I bought into the notion that "the best preamp is not to use any preamp" and we need to keep the signal shortest from our source to the speakers.
But inserting this preamp between my Tact and the Moscode 401HR changed my perception completely. It add so much "air", "juice", and "meat" to my good recordings, cymbals/bass now have better attack & transient, when I listen to Brian Bromberg's "Wood", I could literally feel "smoke" coming out of each string note. I was never impressed with the quality of Luther Vandross's "Songs" album, but the Dodd preamp changed all that, last night when I listened to the song "Killing me softly", it sounded so good that I wouldn't leave my chair even if someone threaten to kill me.
The most important thing is, I no longer have to put up with my bad recordings. The "air" makes my poor classical recordings sounded BIGGER than ever and now I feel like sitting in the concert hall.
I often used the target curves/room-correction features of the Tact preamp to overcome the weakness in some of the recordings. For example, if the female vocal is too harsh, I would roll-off the high frequency to tone it down, if the bass is too loose/lack of control, I would adjust the bass response to make them sound tight and punchy.
Now, with the insertion of this preamp, I do not need the room-correction features of the Tact, I just switch the Tact to "bypass", ie. no correction at all, and just happily listen to all kind of recordings. Whatever kind of music I threw at it, it just makes them sing. On a few tracks (Patricia Barber's "Gotcha"), I do find that the bass be too strong but I fix it by opening my door to let some bass escape and then it sounded just perfect.
This coming weekend I will try to borrow an $18k BAT REX preamp to do a shootout. aa
So, in short, I am a very happy owner. Congratulation to Mr. Dodd for inventing such a fine product.
YMMV of course.
Barry
Houston, TX
