6/26/2023 0 Comments Parasound p5The company says that all incoming jitter on the digital inputs is significantly attenuated with an effective clock recovery system. Some won’t like the fact that it doesn’t run 24/192 via USB, but this was done to obviate the need for the installation of PC drivers, “adding a level of complexity we simply did not want” according to Schram. Burr-Brown’s PCM1798 DAC is specified because it is “proven workhorse that is incredibly reliable and sounds great”, according to Parasound. Low-noise parts are specified across the board and there are seven carefully laid out circuit boards. Attention is said to have been paid to the power supply – an over specified and very low impedance 65W affair is used, as seen in the company’s P 7, 7.1-channel analogue preamp. Inside, carefully selected parts are used, including a motor-driven ALPS volume control potentiometer. Parasound’s Richard Schram calls it, “a veritable Swiss Army knife”, and he’s not wrong. It’s fair to say then that this is a lavishly equipped preamp with everything but the kitchen sink thrown in. You also get defeatable bass and treble controls, headphone jack, fixed-level record output and even the option of snazzy rack mounting handles. a front panel subwoofer level control, and a front panel auxiliary input with automatic +12dB gain stage. It sports an analogue bass management system with high and low pass crossovers, a home theatre bypass input for surround sound integration. The former runs up to 24-bit, 96kHz resolution and the latter 24/192. A Burr-Brown PCM1798 DAC chip is fitted inside, hooked up to a choice of USB, optical and coaxial inputs. To reassert its identity even more, to its five line-level RCA inputs you can add a full moving magnet and moving coil (with 100ohm or 47Kohm load) input, and a built-in digital-to-analogue converter. It’s as if Parasound has rejected the fashion for sparse, often passive, designs and gone back in time to the days when the preamp was one of hi-fi’s big beasts. It sports a wide expanse of brushed aluminium on its fascia, plus lots of knobs, buttons and sockets. It is a fully spec’d design, that’s not too dissimilar visually from the big American and Japanese models made at the end of the seventies. Parasound’s Halo P5 has a job on its hands then. Again, this takes people ever further away from the active electronic types of yesteryear. These don’t always sound as good as active ones, so there’s now a movement towards transformer types. This means a lot of people bypass theirs completely, or use simple passive types. To add insult to injury, the best sounding preamp is no preamp. Suddenly the poor preamp is having an identity crisis, with many audiophiles questioning the need for one at all! Many examples of either have built-in volume controls, therefore bypassing the need for a preamplifier completely. Nowadays though, we have phono stages that can provide a line-level output from LP records, and of course CD players and DACs give one automatically. Music came from vinyl, and its meagre output was such that plugging it directly into a power amplifier would have produced all the power, as Captain Blackadder once said, of an asthmatic ant. A preamp sat in front of the power amp, because without it there was no way of getting music from your sound source. In the olden days, when mammoths roamed the wild planes and Duran Duran were at number one, its job was clear. In today's preamplifier world, you've got to be all things to all men - and Parasound's P5 attempts precisely this, says David PriceĪ preamplifier’s life is not a happy one.
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