2 channel pre-amp or most expensive volume control in the world?

I bet its the added power in driving the woofers. More power = better control of the driver.
That is why the bass sounds better . Put a Bel canto amp that has the same power as your Int and i bet it doesnt sound as good as the 1000w'ers.

Athanasios

Bollocks

Interesting. According to the MBL web site, the speakers have 82 dB/w sensitivity and a maximum linear output of 106 dB. That means that they are linear for power levels up to 24 dB above one watt which is about 220 watts.

Seems to me that your MBL 7008 is either an incompetent amplifier, MBL is an incompetent speaker company who does not understand how to spec their products, or you were just about right with the MBL 7008 amplifier.

Or perhaps, you are habitually driving your speakers into their nonlinear range. Not exactly high fidelity.

Absolute Bollocks. If you want really powerful amplfiers you move over to the professional sound side of the house where you can get good 2.5 KW amplifiers and change from $500.

Warning: 2.5 KW amplifiers are not consumer toys and can seriously break things! ;-)

We used to call them "Arc Welders" .

Since you already have it, why not just try using the W4S volume control.

You could try using it now, instead of the MBL volume control (just set the MBL at the max you would ever use, and vary the volume with w4s).

Likely you'll find you do not need the MBL at all and can go straight from w4s to your amps. The only danger with this is if the w4s can accidentally find itself putting out full volume signal - hopefully (likely) they designed it so that this does not happen

There is no logic to buy in that belief.

A more apt analysis is that "audiophile" amps are built for audiophiles, "commercial" amps are built for rational, sane people.

cheers,

AJ

Who don't mind a little fan noise ? Or is that a non-issue these days ???

edit: and it does not matter, the OP already has the amps. All he/she has to do is figure out if they can sell their existing "volume control". And I suspect they can.

Non-issue when you get convection cooled commercial amps.

What fan noise?

If you make it one.

cheers,

AJ

If you buy the correct amps, it's a non issue. At worst it's a minor inconvenience to change out the fans for quieter units.

Brilliant! I want that on a T-shirt, or a challenge coin.

You mean the Crown MA10000?

The problem with this can be two fold.

Problem one is that most digital volume controls throw away bits as they lower the volume. So as you lower the volume, you are listening to reduced data and dynamics. You are only hearing all your data when your digital volume control is at 0db. You'd have to look into how the digital volume works on your unit.

Problem two is that you often see level or impedence mis-matches when you plug source equipment directly into an amplifier. Preamplifiers are designed to buffer that.

When you consider that power supply requirements are met in a linear function, and amplitude in an exponential function, it becomes immediately apparent that even a modest amount of dynamic range can use up massive amounts of power. I'd go so far as to say that there's no such thing as "too much power" capability, bearing in mind that the sheer economics of delivering that power will be the deciding factor 99.999% of the time.


If you strip out the weasel words and reverse the perspective, that will be much more informative IMHO.

There is a camp that insists that some amplifiers sound "better" (a weasel word that we'll have to put up with for now) and cite vague and hard to follow theories as to why that's "a fact". Trying to pin a member of this camp on specifics appears to be impossible by design. I suspect that they do that on purpose. About the only time I witnessed a member of this camp put it on paper and publish it with his name as author was when the late Harvey Rosenberg of New York Audio Labs fame.

Harvey argued that discrete transistors sounded better than op-amps, and that thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) sounded better than transistors. It was clear, to the point and a complete and total straw man argument.

What Harvey had done was to make a bulletproof case for the relative deficiencies of the three basic audio amplifier modes at the time (A, AB and C) when they were operated outside of their linear range. So while Harvey got his technical facts straight, he completely failed to prove his assertion. And he completely ignored the possibility that an engineer might design a circuit to operate within its linear range, as was customary even back then. Otherwise the book was a very useful handbook summary of amplifier design. I really mean that. As long as you took the glaring errors into account, it was actually quite informative.

I met Harvey and read his book around the time that Bob Carver of Phase Linear fame was promoting his new self-named company with a challenge to the staff of Stereophile magazine to tell the difference between a couple of highly regarded high-end amplifiers and his amplifier which was tuned to mimic the transfer function of the others. And sure enough, the golden-eared Stereophile writers lost the challenge, completely on their own terms.

My linear circuits professor scoffed at the stunt, noting that if you design an amplifier with a simple unity transfer function, that the amplifier would "have no sound at all" meaning that it acted like the proverbial straight wire with gain. Finding the components that remained perfect long enough to make a practical amplifier was a physical impossibility. And the methods used to force more linearity out of a circuit presented their own complications. And then there was the complex load of the loudspeaker and interactions that certainly affected the loudspeaker's transfer function, if not the amplifier's!

After stepping out of the academic and back into the pragmatic realm, I knew enough to see that an amplifier made from unobtanium, moon rocks and virgins' tears was indistinguishable from an amp made from tinsel and squirrel teeth as long as care was taken to keep inside the linear envelope. I also learned the dirty not-so-little secret of loudspeakers, namely that their distortion on the best of days far exceeded the sum total of the entire signal path ahead of them on the worst of days.


Bob Carver did win, after all.

I'm not sure what all the talk of fan noise is about. Plenty of commercial products don't have fans, and plenty of home-made ones do. I think that someone told you a fib, both about the fans and the notion that high-end stuff being knitted by nice old ladies with only your best interests in mind. If that was true, they wouldn't be taking 1000% or more profit margins!

LOL...maybe my data...like the A/C and the fridge, the neighbors and other noises.

I've never seen a volume control with a "0dB" setting for the same reason why none went to "11" until after "This is Spinal Tap" became a hit.

All kidding aside, no volume control has magical powers to control anything more than the output of whatever it controls. So ambient noise remains as it was, regardless of volume control settings. So like it or not, turning down the volume just shifts the quieter passages down into the weeds of the ambient noise. Even if you cut out the least significant bits, the net effect is the same.

In fact, using say a 24-bit DAC to play a 16-bit music CD does in fact mean that the least significant bits, a whole 1/3 of all available bits are turned off and doing nothing. An outrage! Highway robbery! Actually it's no big deal. You're still getting every bit that you purchased. And because 24 bits can be made to represent a SPL range from the threshold of hearing to beyond the threshold of pain, any bits that might get thrown away will be done at a level so far below the threshold of hearing that even the silliest high-end propagandists can't challenge the laws of nature at such an extreme.

So in other words, adjusting volume in the digital domain works just fine, and as long as the tool is made for the use there are no drawbacks,


Really? I always thought that preamplifiers had at least something to do with their name.

Back in my day, we used phonographs that put out signals in the microvolt range. Back then microvolts couldn't get us any appreciable volume at the speakers, whether the impedance was buffered or not. so we pre-amplified the phono output to line levels. On the supply side we used microphones that had similar needs. If you wanted to have anything more than tape noise to play back, you used a microphone preamp.

Adding bells and whistles like input switching, volume controls, equalization and other geegaws were nice to have, of course. But without the pre-amplification, these too were useless.

I have no doubt that there were tens, maybe even dozens of people who eschewed the phonograph and only played tapes, so they didn't use the phono preamp. But this was by far the exception and not the rule. And it was only a technicality really. To record to tape they needed those microphone preamps, and to play back the tapes they needed the preamplifiers that were built into the tape decks. (Unlike phonographs that all used the same RIAA pre/de-emphasis EQ curves, the audio tape industry had no such convention, and therefore no universal tape preamp was available for them.)

Although there were undoubtedly some very unstable power amps that may have benefited from buffering, those were unusual cases, not the norm. As for impedance, that was standardized in both production and consumer playback equipment a long time ago. Even when CD players with non-standard line outputs as high as 10V came out, that was never a problem for me or anyone who I knew, even through vintage equipment that couldn't have anticipated these levels. I guess that over-engineering my stereo system paid off as well.

Oh, why do I bother.

re: digi volume controls, all you have to do is google to learn how they work. 0db usually equals max volume on the digi volume control of a cd player. that is the point of which it is playing all the data full volume. it lowers volume by throwing away bits. Now you may be OK throwing bits away and you may not be able to hear it, but you can't say scientifically that I can't and usually people who have invested in MBL's don't want to listen to their cd's truncated to mp3 as they lower the volume control.

re: preamps you are all confused on the difference between gain and impedence. the buffer of which i spoke is between input and output impedence. has nothing to do with gain, which is also necessary based on the fact that most digi volume controls max at 0db. combined with the typically higher output impedence than an amplifer input wants to see,there is usually not enough to drive an amplifier to satisfying levels.

re: your answer... a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing so make fun all you want.

That's all I need to know, thanks.

I'm not a cruel person, so I'd never make fun of someone like you. Actually I hope that one day you might understand what I was saying, and not beat yourself up for "being so dense". Everybody starts off knowing nothing, so there's no shame in knowing less than others. The only shameful thing IMHO is to invest in ego instead of knowledge.

Cheers!