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Re: Message for Christine Tham: Need advise

I listen to stereo most of the time, and derive a lot of enjoyment out of stereo. Mostly it's due to availability of titles - whilst I have hundreds of multi-channel titles, I have thousands of stereo only albums.

Having said that, I do believe m-ch can sound better than stereo (and I usually, but not always, prefer the m-ch to stereo on most discs), but on the condition the m-ch setup is as good as (on a per channel basis) as stereo. In other words, if you have spent $X on stereo, you need to spend at least $3X on m-ch to get equivalent quality (simply because of the extra channels).

For most people, this is unrealistic, or perhaps the benefits (in terms of relatively few titles available) may not be worth it. But think of it this way, if you do invest in a truly high end m-ch setup, you can use it to also increase your HT enjoyment. We use our system for both music and movies, and I must admit it does make the movies more fun to watch (esp. on those soundtracks where they make the extra effort to put a lot of detail in the surround field). I am hoping we will start seeing uncompressed (i.e. high resolution) movie soundtracks with the new formats (BluRay and HDDVD).

In terms of your question on a good multi-channel preamp/processor, I would go for a high end analog m-ch preamp. There aren't a lot out there, but there's a few. I'm using the Sony TA-P9000ES, which is not bad, but it's discontinued. In addition, my Cary Cinema 6 supports dual 7.1 analog ins, so in total I can switch between 4 m-ch analog inputs (and believe me, I need all 4!) - the Cary is quite a decent analog preamp.

If you really want high end, I would suggest you consider the EMM (Switchman?).

I would try and avoid using a surround processor for hi-rez music (where the digital decoding is done by the processor, as opposed to the processor being used purely as an analog preamp). I suspect most of the digital interfaces supported today (HDMI, FireWire, etc.) are high jitter and you may get better results (ie. less jitter) from the analog output of an good SA-CD or DVD-Audio player. Some people would probably disagree with me on this, but that's my personal view.

Another option is to go for a passive preamp (no buffer stage, attenuation only). Theoretically, passive is better but I've had a few issues with impedance mismatches affecting bass output and dynamics.

Recently, I did an interesting experiment, which was to record an LP via an active preamp, and without a preamp by connecting the output of the phono stage directly to the ADC. Interestingly, the version via an active preamp actually sounded better - it had more detail, and was more dynamic. So don't necessarily assume passive is better.

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