Posted by bill epstein [ 65.189.211.118 ] on July 17, 2007 at 04:53:10:
I was very happy with the lack of sound from my recently acquired
LS-1 but knew it could be less.
Replaced the 20 year old coupling and output caps, removing all the by-passes as well. Copper case Obbligatos for the .47uF couplers and 4.7uF Obbligato oil 'n film for outputs. Resulted in an even lower noise floor and a slightly richer tone of instruments and voices.
The Alps Blue pot bothered me, too. I knew from replacing one in my Ella, first with a Black Beauty and then a TKD that the TKD had a much airier presentation and a wider, deeper soundstage. Better low-level channel balance, too.
Clipped the solder leads off the TKD and ran short pieces of silver wire from the eyelets to the board, a 1 hour job, 45 minutes of which was removing the Blue and the solder!
I also replaced the stock feet with EAR L-021 feet, the 15lb. load blue ones. They made a big difference in the sound of a phono pre-amp I just finished reviewing. Finally, placed a sheet of EAR Isodamp constrained layer damping between the power transformer and the case.
First impression was that ARC knew what they were doing voicing the LS-1 with the Blue Alps and I had blown it. I was hearing an edgy treble. Damnation! 5 or 6 hours later, tho' the edginess was gone and the combination of tweaks has taken this 20 year-old pre-amp waaay up in performance. Credit Matt Anker of SACDMods.com for the ideas based on his ARC mod service. You can pick-up an LS-1 or LS-2 for $500 to $800 and do this or have Matt do it for you quite reasonably.
The LS-1/Simple 45 combo now sounds even better than what I wrote in my recently published review: Simple 45
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