you wrote:

::::Thanks for checking with Kevin about the transistors.
I am going to order some from him tomorrow.::::

Glad I could assist. Kevin's a good guy and I've enjoyed working with
him on some of our new products.

::::What type of line stage are you in the process of building, details?
Curious minds want to know::;;.

awe... it's a bit premature for us to release many specific design details at this juncture. Here are some of the directions and details of what we are developing... all of the following subject to the rigors of an ongoing R&D program...

It's a line level only preamp with a commercially unique circuit architecture. It uses two tubes. It has a rectifier tube. Has independent power supplies for each channel. It employs 3 pieces of signal carrying iron per unit. The output impedance is less than 100 ohms with a correspondingly large current drive capacity. It has a transformer buffered input stage. It can accomadate bal signal transmission (i.e., xlr). It can also accomadate single ended signal transmissions (i.e., rca). It employs authentic Peerless (tm) iron in critical component areas. A means is provided for attenuation of the input signal. It will accomadate multiple input sources and most likely have monitoring capabilities. Multiple core materials (mu metal and nano crystalline c-cores) are planned as customer specified options. Power supply filter features a very large >100 henry custom made by MagneQuest choke for each channel.

Though my description is somewhat vague... I hope it gives you some idea of where we might be headed with this preamp. As your aware... since we are a magnetics producer (including the Peerless (tm) and MagneQuest (tm) brand names) our preamp is rich in iron. But iron smartly deployed if I may be so immodest.

As an earnest stab at the state of the art... this preamp is not going to be cheap which only reflects our commitment to build the best we can... i.e., we are not interested in desgining and building to an arbitrary price point derived by a marketing study. Our preamp (code named "Abbie") will only be available as a finished product. It is one of three finished products that we currently have under development. We anticipate availability late in the first quarter of 2006.

Our other two undertakings are a transformer based passive preamp (much, much less mullah)and a dedicated stand alone moving coil step up transformer.

in the meantime... get your irons hot and build that Guinevere... hope you have some fun and experience some rewarding tunes with your new self-built preamp.

cheers,

msl