What Is A Preamp? A Beginner’s Guide To Using Separates In Their Stereo System

hi my name is aaron and i run a website called forever analog it's a site that celebrates uh my love of home audio receivers turntables cassette decks um there are repair articles available if you're having troubles with your gear there is a link to a disc cogs page where i buy and sell records there is also a link to an etsy store that has t-shirts that you can buy for the audio lover in your life for instance this is a shirt we designed for a marantz stack of gear there's also a shirt that simply says i will buy your records and i call it my walking craigslist ad because as i found out during the pandemic when i was walking around the neighborhood wearing that shirt that people would come up to me and a neighbor in particular actually asked me do you actually buy records and i said yes and he brought me two crates of great records that i was able to to buy from him so again my walking craigslist ad if you're interested in seeing those shirts visit the etsy link in the description of this video or go to foreveranalog.net where you'll find a link to those as well but today we're talking preamps if you are someone who's been into stereo gear for a long time this is going to be a very basic video it may be a little too basic for you i'm making this video for my friends who are just now getting into home audio and wanting to build a stereo at home a lot of my friends grew up listening to ipads or ipods you know you know or they have like crosley record players fine and they're interested in building a a better stereo at home and over the last six or seven years i've been buying and selling vintage audio and documenting that on instagram and facebook so i get a lot of questions from friends and one of the main questions i get is what is a preamp when i post about it almost everyone is familiar with a receiver such as this this is the very first vintage receiver i ever bought my marantz 2270. an integrated receiver you've got a preamp and an amplifier in one box right but people are confused when i separate those out and just have a pre-amplifier and an amplifier and they asked me a lot of questions about it so i thought i'd make a quick video today just explaining why i would want to separate those out and what the functions are of each and how they work together and why you would need both the preamp and amp you know to work together in your system so first for this video demonstration i have a i have two preamps here normally you would only have one running through your system but i have this carver c2 pre-amplifier as a uh just an easy model that i can pick up nothing's plugged to it and turn it around and show you everything i'm mostly using right now my home system uh my new emotiva pt100 preamp which is plugged into my uh also emotiva a100 amplifier this is the system i'm currently using i just bought this preamp off facebook they said it wasn't working um it's partially working i'm having trouble with the phono input um but overall i need to kind of get in there and clean it out and uh and and and take a look at it and see if i can get it working again but i thought it'd be great to uh to have up here for today's example so i always tell people that the preamp to me i always equate it to sort of like the brain of your stereo system um it's taking all the inputs from the sources and it's deciding which one is going to be sent to the amplifier to be heard and uh it's also going to determine at what volume what tones what balance all those sort of things it's it's it's making a lot of decisions as part of your audio chain if you think about your chain um you know the signal path of your chain at the very front you'll have your source your cd player your turntable or streaming dac and near the end you'll have at the very end you'll have your speakers near the end you'll have your amplifier in this case this is my amplifier its sole job is to power the speakers and send the audio signal through the um through the speakers so you really need something in the middle of that chain to take all those sources and connect them to one thing and then have that box send it to your amplifier which will then send it to your speakers that is what a preamp does a preamp is going to allow you to hook up all your sources cd player turntable streaming dac select which one you want to listen to determine the volume and then send that signal to your amplifier to your speakers so as an example here um a lot of people also call the preamp a control amplifier and for an obvious reason it's where all your controls are so for instance on this um c2 carver unit all the way over here is your volume control obviously you know what volume control is you've got your balance control so you can tune your speakers left or right depending on your room your tone controls bass treble if you want more bass more trouble this has a stereo mono switch if you have a mono uh vinyl record collection you could switch it to mono to listen to that i mostly have stereos uh stereo records so i keep it on stereo this has a tape monitor switch which is common on vintage not so much common on modern amp uh preamps and then finally your selector switch so this is the button that you would switch do i want to see my cd player do i listen to my record player or do i want to listen to my dac you switch it there and then it sends that signal to your amplifier so on the rear you'll see all the inputs on a vintage one you're going to have tape inputs a tuner input and your phono input which is probably most important for most people on my modern emotiva down there it doesn't have the tape inputs and it has more digital inputs that i can use for say my streaming dac but it has a cd input an auxiliary input and a photo input and i can put all those in there now the most important output on your preamplifier is here this is the main out and what that does is you hook your rca cables to the main output here on your preamplifier and then you run those rca cables into the input of your amplifier and that is going to send the signal out from your preamp into your amplifier out to your speakers so you can hear me hear your music it's really that simple so that's the main role of the preamp a lot of people ask me why do i bother having separate preamps and amps when i could just use my marantz with excuse me with everything in one box the short answer is i've been after six or seven years and a lot of research i found that uh these vintage integrated receivers um they often you know they're 40 50 years old and they often start to go bad and you know you need to replace the transistors or capacitors or those uh those things and when when those start to go bad it's really hard to locate what exactly is the issue is it in the preamp or is it in the amplifier and so one of the things that i did or i have found is that if you just have a pre-amplifier and an amplifier it's a lot easier to figure out what the problem is for instance on this carver if i plug a turntable to it in the phono preamp it's not working and i can't i can't quite figure out why just yet but i'll get in there and see if i can if i had it hooked up to here it might be i might be confused as to what you know what exactly was wrong is it something in the amplifier or is it in the preamp so by having these separate it can sometimes make it a little bit easier to figure that out now the other reason why i really enjoy it is because uh i like switching gear in and out i like buying a lot of gear um and i like seeing uh hearing how things sound so for instance um this emotiva amplifier i could pair it with uh this carver preamp and it may have a different sound than the two emotiva units together um if i didn't like that sound i could take this emotiva amplifier out and put my macintosh mc2505 amplifier in and i've got two vintage units i've got the vintage carver and the vintage macintosh running together to see how that sounds or i don't know would it be interesting to hear what a vintage macintosh amplifier sounds like with a modern emotiva preamplifier cool yeah let's hook it all up and find out it's just more fun when you have separates because you can just change things in and out more often it's just easier i guess it's not really easier if you think about it you just it's easier with just one box right you just take the take the integrated receiver out and you move a new one in and there you go but i guess you can get a little bit more nuanced as to how your preamp might sound um versus the amplifier and when you've got a all-in-one box it's that's basically it that's all you can do some vintage receivers will allow you to pull jumpers out of the back and only use a preamp and an amplifier something i'll make a video about soon um but a lot of uh the the a lot of vintage amplifiers or excuse me a lot of vintage receivers don't give you the ability to do that so again it's fun just to have these things separate uh move them around and see how they sound i tend to think they're a little less noisy when you have a separate preamp and a separate amplifier but you know it's very very small uh i would never say that this 2270 uh was too noisy um but um but i just noticed a little bit of a cleaner sound when i had the preamp and the amplifier uh the other last main sort of job of the preamp is to uh boost low level signals now your lowest level signal will be coming from your turntable and if you've ever noticed you can take your turntable your record player when it's not plugged into any speakers and you can put your needle on it let it play and you'll hear music just very very softly you know it's kind of like me you can almost hear the song and that's basically the cartridge outputting a very low signal that you can hear well the preample most preamplifiers will have a phono preamp built in and you plug your turntable into that phono preamp and it will boost that low signal to uh to an audible signal that's sent to your amplifier through your speakers so that you can hear the music appropriately there's also standalone photo pre-amplifiers but i most likely will make a video about those as well so yes these like i said i enjoy having the separates a lot of people you know just want the integrateds and i don't think there's one right way or wrong way if you uh if you've been buying gear for a long time and you think i've left something out uh in regards to explaining what a prehip's job is i tried to avoid you know real specific ri double a you know curves and things of that nature and just keep it real simple but if there's something interesting that you think that i left out please leave a comment uh below if you have any questions you can place those there as well like i said i have a website called foreveranalog.net please click on the link in the description and if you enjoyed this video subscribe so we'll be making more in the future thanks

Channel: Forever Analog

Views: 70,487

Keywords: preamp, preamplifier, stereo preamp, stereo preamplifier, stereo, vintage audio, marantz 2270, carver c2, emotiva pt-100

Id: CR4W9q9erFo

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021