Hunt for hifi XIII: Amp woes — Separates, at separate times?
After ruling out the option of pairing my digital amp with an ADC, I’m facing the fact that I need a new amp in order to get my system to where I’m satisfied. Since the speakers aren’t paid off for quite some time, my funds are pretty limited. So while a high-end integrated like the tried & tested Pass Labs INT-150 or the esoteric and mysterious newcomer Devialet D-premier would be tremendously exciting, I am simply unable to pay for something like that, no matter how much I’d wish to own it.
Used units of the Pass do surface on occasion, sometimes at the very outskirts of my financial reach, so perhaps it’s still an option. But buying second hand will make it very difficult to do a proper evaluation and I have no desire to buy anything blindly.
While my budget is insufficient for an integrated amp that does my speakers justice, I could cut the investment in half by just buying half the amp – I could get a separate power amp. The problem, of course, is input selection and volume control. But if I can live with a huge bottleneck for a year or so, I could use my Allen & Heath Xone:42 DJ mixer as the preamp! Perhaps the bottleneck won’t even be that enormous – it’s one of the finer sounding mixers on the market, after all.
A benefit of the mixer-as-a-preamp approach is that by the time I’ve saved up (or acquired though forays into male prostitution) enough money for a preamp, there might be more and better options of DAC/preamp combos than the Benchmark DAC1 PRE. Neither Esoteric nor Weiss built analog throughputs into their latest designs, so we’re probably a year or more away from proper competition in this category. With such a unit I could still get a two-box option by going with power amp and dac/pre instead of integrated and dac. Not counting the phono amp of course…
The downside of this is of course that I will have glorious speakers and a great power amp but mediocre sound for a year or more. Considering all the money and the effort that goes into this, which is about the lust for music in the end, it’s not a very attractive proposition. But neither is spending huge amounts of money on something that isn’t quite right.
On a whim (and after a beer or two), I listed my Lyngdorf TDAI 2200 amp for sale on Friday night. It got picked up by a new owner less than 48 hours later, so now I’m really in a hurry, but at least I’ve freed up some funds. The Stockholm Highend Fair is just a few days away, and hopefully I’ll find the amp of my dreams there, just like I found my speakers last year.
