THE CD PLAYER PLUS - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

Say, don’t we
Listening Feedback Room
Audiomat Phono 1.6
already ow n one
of these? No, ours is the
Phono-1.5. But with software
a “point-one” upgrade is just a minor
update and bug fix (and typically it’s
free, too, but dream on). Yet this new
preamp, Audiomat’s only solid state
product, other than the DAC’s, looks
totally different from ours. And it’s billed
as a major upgrade, the result of years of
research.
It would need to be a major upgrade,
because the Phono-1.5 — successor to a
Phono-1 that was merely pretty good —
was definitely reference quality. It was, in
short, a tough act to follow. Then again,
this new preamp has been something like
a decade in the making.
Despite the small change in the
model name, the Phono-1.6 doesn’t
look anything like its predecessor. That
preamp was wide and black, with an
external power supply that looked like
an experimenter’s box, with a captive
power cord. The new one, which you can
see above, is back to being half-width,
just like the original Phono-1, and it too
looks like an experimenter’s box, only a
much nicer one. The power supply, at its
right, is in a disparate but rather more
handsome box than the old one, and now
has a standard IEC jack, so that you can
choose your favorite power cord. Like
the previous one, the Phono-1.6 comes
mounted on a set of three hefty cones.
Curiously, the power supply sits on little
stick-on rubber feet. If it were ours we
would fix that, we thought, and…who
knows?
The power supply itself has a captive
umbilical cord, with a five-pin XLR
plug that connects to the main chassis.
46 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
Like t he
earlier preamp,
the Phono-1.6 has no
settings to accommodate different
moving coil phono cartridges.
This may be a deal-breaker for some,
though it should be said that today’s MC
cartridges are less weird than they once
were, and the days when you needed to
choose extreme impedance or capacitance
settings are pretty much gone.
As we have explained before, the task
facing the designer of a phono preamplifier
is so huge that it’s a wonder anyone
ever gets it right, and indeed at one
time no one did. The circuits must deal
with impossibly small signals, often well
under a millivolt — and that’s peak level,
with even tinier currents representing
the subtle nuances that make music so
thrilling. Despite that, there must not
be audible noise at the output. As if
that weren’t enough, the amplification
is not flat across the whole frequency
range, but must greatly boost the lows
and attenuate the highs, to compensate
for the curve used in the recording
process. It must be able to follow even
the quickest transients, something some
phono preamps are notoriously rotten
at. Last but hardly least, it must be able
to transmit the visceral, organic power
of music. When it succeeds it feels like
magic, because it is.
You can, of course, get a phono
preamp for as little $20. It gets the job
done, but don’t be too surprised if it
flunks out on pretty much all the criteria
we’ve mentioned.
Still, this Audiomat is a long way
from a $20 preamp, which means we
went into the session with a tall stack of
expectations. First, of course, we began
by putting the Phono 1.6 through a
rigorous break-in process, using the
special Granite Audio break-in CD (it is
recorded at very low level, with
a reverse RIAA equalization
curve, so that a phono preamp
“sees” it as a phono cartridge).
Though we would be doing the
evaluation with the MM input,
we gave both the MM and MC
inputs about 200 hours of running
time. Each!
Our cartridge, the London Reference
mounted on our Linn LP12, is not
actually a moving magnet cartridge,
but it does have high output, just like
an MM. We listened, then, with our
Omega system, comparing the Phono 1.6
directly to its illustrious predecessor.
We noticed one difference right off:
the Phono 1.6 is quiet. We know we
said that about the older model too, but
quietness is relative. It shows up like this:
turn the preamp volume up to normal
listening volume, and cycle through
the inputs. Can you tell, from listening
position, which one is the phono input?
With the Phono 1.5 we just could. Not
with this one.
We picked out four albums that we
figured would let us determine the difference
between the two phono preamps,
if indeed there was a meaningful one.
Those albums would not turn out to
be enough, but let’s not get ahead of
ourselves.
We began with the wind band piece
76 Trombones, found on Frederick Fennell’s
double LP, Beachcomber (Reference
Recordings RR-62). It begins softly, as
though a marching band were approaching
from the distance, but it sure doesn’t
remain soft!
The music had impressive power, but
then we are used to hearing it that way,
because we have both the amplification
and the loudspeakers to do it justice.
Albert and Toby were immediately
impressed by the Phono 1.6’s rendition.
“There’s more substance,” said Albert,
“the music has more body and more
density, with more natural warmth.”
Toby agreed, finding a fuller sound
with greater density in the higher frequencies.
“The odd harmonics in this
music are smoother. The cymbals are