Pre-amp with 2 pre-outs for stacked 57's

[oxtobyd]

I'm experimenting and have put together a pair of stacked Quad 57's, one pair is driven by a Quad 22 & pair of Quad II's, and the second pair by a Quad 44 & 606, and i'm splitting the CD-Source to feed both pre-amps... now it sounds pretty good but not right, if you know what i mean, and i'm thinking i need to somehow simply this, so i though maybe a good single pre-amp with 2 pre-outs to go direct to the 606 & Quad II's would help, but then i'd need to tweak the gain i guess on the pre-outs to match the power-amps. What do people think? (i've tried running the 4 57's via the 606 in parallel, but it also sounds off, way to much bass for me) help.....

 

[stevos]

All the cyrus pre-amps have 2 sets of outputs and all sound very good.

However i am not sure they would work as they don't allow any tweaking of the sound.

 

[alexs2]

I'm experimenting and have put together a pair of stacked Quad 57's, one pair is driven by a Quad 22 & pair of Quad II's, and the second pair by a Quad 44 & 606, and i'm splitting the CD-Source to feed both pre-amps... now it sounds pretty good but not right, if you know what i mean, and i'm thinking i need to somehow simply this, so i though maybe a good single pre-amp with 2 pre-outs to go direct to the 606 & Quad II's would help, but then i'd need to tweak the gain i guess on the pre-outs to match the power-amps. What do people think? (i've tried running the 4 57's via the 606 in parallel, but it also sounds off, way to much bass for me) help.....

I agree that you're almost certainly going to need the ability to match gain for both sets of amps,but I'm not sure that doing it in the way you have in mind is going to work well.

Personally,I would use the 44 preamp,and use a splitter to deliver the source signal to both sets of power amps,with an attenuator in the feed to one of needed for gain matching.

Even this is an untidy arrangement but probably the best initial method....the Quad 22 is at best a rather wooly sounding preamp now,and perhaps best kept as a part of a complete set should you ever decide to part with the Quad IIs.

Even the IIs are rather soft sounding now,and will certainly have a very different tonal balance to your other 44/606 combo....

Running stacked ESls with different power amps is a recipe for imbalances,and I'm not surprised that trying to run the stacked pairs paralleled off the 606 didnt work well.....the extremely low impedance and reactivity at certain frequencies would test most amps abilities.