Does anyone have a Valab LCR Phono Stage they would be willing to demo or
possibly send to London for a home demo. Would put a ££ deposit in place and pay for all carriage..
Appreciated.
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Does anyone have a Valab LCR Phono Stage they would be willing to demo or
possibly send to London for a home demo. Would put a ££ deposit in place and pay for all carriage..
Appreciated.
Of the MK2:
Full bodied sound but never sounded fat or chunky. Soundstage was nice and wide. Really well balanced, tonally. Good insight into the track.
I liked it.
It lost out a on the little things like nuances, but we had the gain set at 68db. We did that to try and make the playing field Equal with my phonostage, except my phonostage now has less gain after a few mods. The Extra gain IMO masked a bit of the finer details and thus imaging suffered a bit. Didn't sound quite as natural as I'm used to but again, if the gain was too high, it wouldn't.
I think, if we had more time to have got the gain right, the Valab would have offered more of what it already did really well and I think the imaging would improve.
Our mistake.
I'd definitely give the Valab another listen as it's certainly in the ballpark of my idea of good. Just needed to sort the setup out. I'm a little annoyed by the fact we got that wrong.
I'm not saying it has imaging problems, or didn't image well, but it didn't image as well as my incumbent phonostage. Which I suspect was down to us having the gain too high. I only mention it to be completely transparent about it.
It did paint a good picture in its own right.
See, when you start comparing gear, it's rare that one unit is better outright than another. There's always an area something does better than something else. The Valab lost out on imaging and naturalism but it had the edge in terms of being fuller sounding.
I can swap valves and fatten the tone up to match it though, so it isn't an outright win in that respect. However I was impressed with the Valab but I'd need to spend some time with one to really get to know it.
It did well because id be willing to give it more system time.
I've just bought a Mk3 and after waiting a few weeks it arrived this morning. Set at 62db gain and still playing with impedance as the Fidelity Research cart currently fitted is specced as 10 ohms.
Most owners report needing a long burn in but we'll see. Certainly the range of adjustment makes it very versatile. Previous Aurorasound Vida owner.
I'll come back and report on progress once it has a few hours on it.
I’m watching this with interest , I just bought Aurorasound Vida as a means to replace my Paradise stage .
Vida is very close but Paradise slightly edges Vida mainly due to creating deeper more 3D soundstage and bit more liquid presentation, mind you I have managed maybe 4 hours of listening time .
Interesting stuff. Crimsondonkey let us know your impressions ...
I started a thread on PFM about my search for Paradise stage replacement, I’ve done so far couple of hours of direct comparison between Vida and Paradise , last few posts in this thread:
https://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/....228292/page-4
It usually equates to approx 25% of the total including postage plus collection fee [emoji6] ( I know the exact %'s but rounded it up )
So on £700 inc postage I'd expect roughly £160 on top plus collection fee but the collection fee varies which was why I thought easier to ask the actual total from crimson
Actually, in this case, its not!
I was gobsmacked to see that I only had to pay £35!!! I've thrown the docket away with the breakdown, but that included the usual £12 'handling' fee. I was expecting the full VAT plus import duty monty from customs.
I must have paid three times that for a vintage Fidelity Research cartridge I just bought from Japan for about £200.
To be frank, I can't really with any great precision.
For a start I think the Valab needs a good few hours on it before you can really assess it. I've also changed carts over, and even worse I've not really had my new TT for very long so that's probably yet to be fully optimised. And then you have to find the sweet spot between the various load and gain settings you can adjust. By which time you then have to try to drag an impression out of your aural memory as to what your records sounded like over a month ago through the Vida...
However, I can offer some hope in that I'm fully enjoying listening to it now, whatever the differences may be.
Am I expecting it to giant slay either the Vida or Paradise? Nope not really, just come close enough so that I don't regret selling my Vida. Its a bit of a stop gap as my intended preamp set up is via a Pioneer H-Z1 MC head amp (which I have) into a Pioneer C-Z1 preamp (which I'm looking for).
Once I think the Valab has settled in I'll also have a play with plugging the H-Z1 into the Valab and setting that for MM 47k output.
Just to put the spanner in the works I have just bought a Lounge Audio LCR Mk3, they are about $300 in the states.
However as supplied they are very flawed, as seen here https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...hono-amp.7244/
There are some very weird design choices in the component selection and subsequent need for 'pre-equalisation' :scratch:
With 4 simple changes to the circuit it is now punching way above its $300 price tag.
I will get others to hear it and see how they rate it soon.
Alan once the Valab has burned in I can pop it up to you for a quick shoot out with the Lounge to see what you think.
Hi Alan.
What were your impressions of the Lounge Audio before you modified it?
That's supposed to be square. Think it speaks for itself lolhttps://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...c5f0470823.jpg
Absolutely spot on.
A lot of folks buy with their eyes. How many people actually read about the measured performance before a purchase?
Personally, I find it quite astonishing that things as fundamental to the unit's performance such as RIAA accuracy and hum from the traffo, seem to have been completely ignored. They MUST have tested it before it went into production.
Actual transcript* from the pre launch meeting at Lounge Audio:
'But what happens if the reviewers start measuring the units and discover the truth'
'We will issue a pre-emptive strike by launching the golden eared reviewers to hype the amp to the stratosphere, using phrases like giant killer, musical, and veil lifting, now get on YouTube and start selling!'
*may not be THE actual transcript
Yes, agreed, it's not the greatest, Alan. As you say, a comparably-priced 'normal' stage easily bettered it ... in my case a Rothwell Simplex.
To my ears, the current Lounge Audio version seems to have been voiced with small, cheap speakers in mind ... bass boost and treble cut. It also seems to have problems with presenting a consistent soundstage. In fact on some recordings, whole instruments seemed to go missing! I had an earlier version a few years back, and it had neither of those problems, at least not to that degree. Since then, the designer has, apparently, listened to 'user feedback' and changed (ruined, actually) the design. Shame, as the original was quite a decent product for the money.
Must say that it did rather amuse me that neither of the engineers who tested it for ASR bothered to actually listen to it after seeing the test results.
Hi Oli
The last time I saw a waveform similar to that is was pretending to be a broken output FET.
This is very basic principles here, imagine trying to reach the far side on the moon on a 50cc Vespa, never mid breaking free from the Earth's atmosphere just trying to hot 35mph would be a bloody miracle!
If a Moped constantly did 55 mph over 24 hours, it would get to the Moon in a 180 Days.
Obviously it would need a little assistance, like maybe a road to make this a reality.
:offtopic:
I could point out save is a vucuum and no air s n combustion but sorry off topic
Suspect Aan has managed to rectify to basic problem quite easily
Sooo, back to the Valab :)
Its been left on for a week and had probably 15-20 hrs of records playing. I've spent a bit of time fiddling with the settings and so far the Fidelity Research FR-1 Mk3 that's currently hanging off the Bergmann seems to prefer 200 ohms and a gain of 67 db. Quite pleased with it tbh, regardless of the money it sounds pretty good so far. Very very quiet.
Next step is to experiment a bit more with different gain settings, and then have a go with the MC head amp set on zero gain and the Valab at MM output. There's 4 impedance settings on the H-Z1 to play with inc 470 ohms to compare.
If you put a square wave through an RIAA network surely that is what you'd expect?
Otherwise, what exactly do you think it should be doing with the high frequency component of the waveform? If it let it through unaltered it wouldn't be much use in eq'ing the output from a cartridge playing a record.
Here's an Aurorasound Vida reproducing a 1 KHz sine wave.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...4c40c911_b.jpg
and here is the same phono stage applying RIAA correction to a 1 KHz square wave
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...2bc58147_b.jpg
That's what it's supposed to look like. You need to remember what a square wave actually is.