It is a good year in my audio journey. Thankful for William of Audiosound.biz to share his passion and time with me. Here are some of the cool stuff, new and vintage that I fell in love with.
Audionet CD Player, Pre-Amp and Power Amp are some of the best in class hardware. Flank on the left is some very nice Mark Levinson 33H power amp, 326s Pre-Amp and vintage Krell power.
Closeup of Audionet Versatile Integrated Player G3
Guissani Research Delta Butterfly
Awesome power and magically musical. 
So much lights in the Audionet Preamp leading the way to music nirvana !
Today, after many eons, i heard the black background in music. Pre-amp could possibly be the weakest link in my current setup and I knew it to change from a Roksan K2 Integrated using the pre-out to a vintage 20 years old Mirror Image .2P Preamp (balance out). As in the search of the holy grail, today i might have found one that might possibly be a very good preamp.
It’s the Mark Levinson No 320S PREAMPLIFIER introduced in 2004. Retail price of US$8000 (used US$4.3k) in it’s days and carries the bloodline of the famed Reference Preamp No 32.
There many useful features that belies it’s simplistic but distinctive layout. This includes Polarity mode, sleep mode, gain and offset parameter setting for each input. One important design is differential balance whereby input signal (single ended) will be converted to balance and remain balance thru to output. This give a even lowered signal to noise experience that could explain why i can hear the “acoustic”of the singer’s recording room.
Here’s a direct comparison to Mirror Image .2P (a decent preamp) :
a) less fuzzy image
b) top end slightly airy but not too airy
c) bottom more define
d) a confident performance but not in your face
And that my friend is audio for the win.