To Bouldly go
The two biggest sonic jolts I’ve experienced involving phono preamps were from two very different ones: the Petr Mares’s Connoisseur 2.0 and Boulder’s 2008, which was reviewed in the July 2002 Stereophile (Vol.25, No.7).1 The first was hand-built, single-ended, housed in a wooden case, limited to 100 units, and, when I got to hear it in the mid-1990s, cost around $6000, or about $10,000 in today’s dollars. The other was a featureladen, double-chassis monument to flexibility and surface-mount high technology. It featured beautifully finished, flush-mounted mirrored buttons your fingers just wanted to press.
A friend had brought over the Mares. Before we hooked it up, he insisted we look inside. There, I found the electronic equivalent of the game “Twister” (which, for those of you unfamiliar, is a form of institutionalized-hence-acceptable physical groping: “Milton Bradley told me to put my hands and feet there, so blame Milton not me”).
The Mares’s design featured an impossibly intricate, hand-wired, tightly configured, three-dimensional jumble of resistors, capacitors, and transistors arranged “just so” to produce the desired sonic effect. Call it confirmation bias or power of suggestion or what-ever you wish, I don’t care, because the sound produced by that compact wooden box (plus an outboard power supply) was, not unlike that handwired jumble, more intensely threedimensional than anything I’d ever before heard; it was also effortless and revealing of inner detail. The design was later sold to cartridge-builder Lyra, which introduced the somewhat more “builder-friendly” (but still complex) Connoisseur, also housed in a wooden case.2 It was discontinued in 2007 because of European ROHS rules, which caused many of the parts critical to the design to go out of production.
The earlier Connoisseur revealed instruments hiding in plain sight on just about every record I played that memorable afternoon. Summed up in one word, it was revelatory.
That was a long time ago, and since then, the state of the art has generally improved,
