Yep. Its a fantastic Pre. To me it sounds like my Marantz gear but a little more neutral. I don't get to listen to all this stuff much anymore. Almost using my headphones all the time in this new house. It keeps the yelling to turn it down to a minimum. Kinda sucks.
I don't think those units are as good as you think. All preamps should be straight wires with gain, and there is no way any decently designed preamp should sound different from another.
There is some audiophoolery and anti digital agenda at the bottom of this debacle.
There are now only three manufacturers, that I can find of analog pots still around. Alps seem to be the best of them, but in quality they are a far cry from the quality of those made in years gone by. Compared to what we used to have the current generation of non indent pots are junk. On the Spec sheet the manufacturer claims a 20% tolerance on the resistor. So there could be a 40% error between the two channels! They claim a maximum number of cycles to be 15000 before it wears out. For a volume control that is not a lot. Worse yet the manufacturer warns against any DC leakage through the pot as it will cause premature failure.
I don't know what the circuit is , but the best for this type is the Peter Baxandal circuit, as I have stated before. This circuit is designed to circumvent or at least ameliorate the shortcomings of these pots.
My hunch is that the P5 circuit is something other. More audiophoolery could be at the bottom of this because of audiophools fixation on the evils of capacitors like C1 in the signal path. I have a hunch that they have some type of odd direct coupled circuit, which is not fully blocking DC and causing premature failure of the pots.
The biggest piece of audiophoolery though, is avoiding a digital volume control. The advent and ascendancy of the superiority of the digital volume control is the reason there are only a few relatively poor analog pots available now.
In John Atkinson's measurements there was more noise at the upper end of the audio spectrum than there should have been. But like he pointed out, I doubt this is audible. It is though probably a harbinger of the problems that develop with these units.
The performance from the digital inputs though was far from stellar. His comment was that these inputs should be regarded as "a convenience." This was a polite way of saying the quality of the unit is not up to snuff.
You can hope and keep you fingers crossed all you want on this troublesome unit. My advice is to get over it and move on to something better. This unit is obviously a poor investment for nearly a grand.
