Cary SLP 98L Preamplifier (Black)

I had it all wrong. I assumed that the “SLP” in SLP-98P stood for stereo line preamplifier. But Dennis Had, Cary Audio’s founder and chief designer, told me that it actually stands for sweet little preamplifier. In a day and age when acme is a word without meaning and the fighting Irish are neither, this strikes me as a risky marketing gambit—but one that may be effective if the name proves true.

For their part, the numbers are more objective: The first preamp in this series, the Cary SLP-90, was designed in 1990. Its successor, the SLP-94, was designed in 1994 (I reviewed it in Listener magazine in 1996). Can you guess the age of this, Cary’s most recent preamp design—and how far behind the curve I am in writing about it?

The SLP-98P, though physically similar to its predecessors, is a different design from the ground up. It uses tubes for voltage gain and buffering only, not for rectification or regulation. And for the first time in Cary Audio history, their flagship preamp is built around the well-loved 6SN7GT, a husky dual-triode from the 1940s that’s become popular in recent years as one of the single-ended-triode (SET) input tubes of choice. The SLP-98P uses two of these per channel, as line-level gain amps and cathode followers, for low output impedance.

Like its predecessors, the basic SLP-98 is available with or without an onboard phono preamp, and while the culturally impoverished can opt for a line-only version—the Cary SLP-98L, which retails for $3100—the SLP-98P reviewed here incorporates pairs of 12AX7 and 12AU7 tubes, for phono gain and buffering, respectively. Covers for the phono tubes, to help prevent microphonics, are a part of the deal, as is RIAA equalization, of course, and a patch of mu-metal shielding on the chassis. Dennis Had points out with glee that, these days, the phono version of his preamp outsells the line-only version by ten to one; not so long ago, the opposite was true.

Also like its predecessors, the newest Cary preamp uses a separate box to house its power supply, containing as it does a frame-type transformer, a choke, and two good-sized smoothing capacitors (together comprising a Pi filter of the usual sort), six regulators, a rectifier bridge, a relay, and other bits. These are connected to the preamp itself through a multi-conductor umbilical cord with threaded connectors at both ends. The power supply isn’t dual-mono throughout, but it does have separate regulators for the two channels’ filament and B+ voltages.

In what has become a recent Cary tradition, the chassis of the SLP-98P is painted in an automotive finish—a stunning Chinese red from the nice people at Jaguar, in this case—and hand-rubbed to a lustrous fare-thee-well. This, combined with the fact that the Cary preamp is only as large as it needs to be and forgoes the silly pretense of rack-mounting, results in a preamp of greater than average beauty, I think.

To is a preposition
Back inside: Except for the bits associated with the Cary’s remote control, everything here is hard-wired, point to point. This is a labor-intensive way to build a preamp, and I admire its finished appearance as much as I assume the SLP-98P is made that way for sonic reasons, above all. (I continue to wonder whether signal integrity suffers from the discontinuities of wide, flat PCB traces as compared with round wire of a relatively small gauge, which is more like the leads of all the passive parts in the circuit—all the while tipping my hat once more to Dennis Morecroft for making the same observation at least two decades ago.) Terminal strips are fastened to the inside of the chassis using a variety of means, including nuts and bolts, self-adhesive standoffs, and epoxy. The chassis itself is well-crafted, and the parts quality is fine if not boutique-y. (Cary does, however, offer stylish oil-filled coupling capacitors at extra cost.) Four tallish, Sorbothane-like feet are bolted to the sturdy bottom cover.

The SLP-98P has a volume/balance-control scheme I enjoyed using. The signal begins its journey at a pair of 100k ohm pots (one for each channel), which provide a full range of channel-specific attenuation for adjusting balance. From there it goes to a nice Alps pot, piggybacked by a little electric motor for the remote. The selector switch is a five-position rotary affair, and there are separate two-way toggle switches on the front panel for muting and the tape monitor. The back row has the five pairs of input jacks, plus monitor loop and two pairs of outputs. Subwoofer users, rejoice; mono enthusiasts, hang down your heads and cry.

The remote handset is bare-bones but useful, with four soft-touch buttons: volume up and down, mute on and off. The remote mute is in addition to the front-panel mute switch, and obviously addresses a separate relay for this purpose: switching the mute from the handset does not physically move the front-panel switch. If the preamp has been muted using the front-panel switch, you can’t unmute it with the remote handset; on the other hand, it’s possible to double-mute the SLP-98P, for an extra margin of safety with software that’s very, very bad.

The Cary’s controls are so complete and well-thought-out that I feel like a grump for voicing this complaint: The Tape Monitor switch is somewhat counterintuitive, for two reasons. First, for normal listening, the switch must be flipped to a position opposite that of the mute switch next to it; ie, in order to play music, while one switch is pointed up, the other must be pointed down. Second, to play music, the monitor switch must be flipped to the position marked Tape. This really confused the heck out of me until I realized that, in this instance, tape is meant as a verb, not a noun. My English degree comes in handy from time to time after all.

I used the Cary preamp with my own SET amps—the Fi 2A3 Stereo and Audio Note Kit One—and, thanks to a loan from EAR USA, I was able to try it with that company’s lovely 890 amplifier, as well. [Art’s review of the 890 will appear in our April issue.—Ed.] Thus I can say with confidence that the SLP-98P didn’t appear to perform differently into mildly different loads. Because the Cary is described as phase-inverting on both its line and phono inputs, and because all the amplifiers I used with it are not, I made sure to reverse cable polarity at both loudspeakers before listening, in order to preserve the integrity of the music waveform’s precise shape to whatever extent was possible. Of course, that assumes that the music selections I made during that time—capriciously and at random, as always—comprised more phase-correct recordings than phase-incorrect ones (or, more perniciously, multitrack recordings made up of both), which is an assumption of no great pedigree.

Powering up the Cary is an exercise in gratification deferred, but a prudent one. A master switch on the outboard power supply gets the AC flowing through its transformer and Pi filter, but only after the rotary power switch on the preamp itself is turned one click do the smaller regulators begin to power up the various tube filaments: a standby mode for keeping the tubes warm but otherwise unperturbed. Turning the power knob one more click to the right gets the rail voltage flowing; the SLP-98P is now ready to play.

The SLP-98P’s phono section had sufficient gain for the one moving-magnet cartridge I tried with it—a nice old Rega Elys—and it worked well with Dynavector’s entry-level, high-output moving-coil cartridge, the 10×5, which I reviewed in Stereophile‘s October 2003 issue, and which I’d better send back or buy soon before this magazine’s sage critics link me to international terrorism or the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. On its own, however, with the low-output MC cartridges I usually use, the Cary’s phono section couldn’t quite cut the mustard. So I combined it with my own Audio Note AN-S2 step-up transformer and a borrowed Tamura L2-D transformer, which is quite good. I really like step-up transformers, anyway.

Sound is a verb
I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to describe the Cary SLP-98P as sounding like a tubed preamp, notwithstanding such stereotypically untubey characteristics as the Cary’s clear (if pleasantly full) lower octaves and overall excellent rhythm and pacing. With all sources, the musical colors passed by the SLP-98P sounded rich to me—not at all lacking in air or believable treble sparkle, but nonetheless distinctly velvety throughout the mids. I mean that in a positive way, of course: a compliment in this wayward age of needlessly complex hybrid circuits that, often as not, make pianos sound like trash compactors and voices like alarms.

Footnote 1: On the old mix as well, the floor tom is used to fill in for an absent electric bass—which it does, but barely. It sounds to me like someone lost their nerve during the recent remix, perhaps assuming that modern listeners would be less willing than their elders to accept such a relatively “lean” sound.—Art Dudley

The SLP-98P, for its part, respected voices. I liked the way it made Frank Sinatra sound on that guiltiest of guilty pleasures, “It Was a Very Good Year,” from September of My Years (LP, Reprise 1014). The sound of his voice was perfectly textured—more so than with most electronics of my experience—and the musical performance itself had a sense of drama beyond mere soft-to-loud dynamics: Call it a feeling of anticipation, where I had not only a good sense of attack on each note but also apprehension—a sonic equivalent of a visual cue, as in a concert setting, of the expressiveness about to occur. I’ve found that only the best—not necessarily the most expensive, but simply the best—audio components get this effect across. The Cary was in their company.

The voice came across with fine scale and presence, too. Francis Albert was big and up front, in a great Hey, Jack, reach out and touch me! kind of way: a presentation that both encouraged and rewarded sitting closer to the speakers. Timbrally, the Cary sounded a little thick to me in the lower mids, making the harp that plays chords throughout the piece (not just the arpeggios that melodramatically signal the start of each new verse) sound just a little heavier than I think it really is.

That latter effect became apparent on other material, but never to the music’s detriment. It certainly didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the new Beatles remix, Let It Be…Naked (CD, Capitol CDP 5 95713 2)—an album of dubious artistic and historic merit overall, albeit one with its own rewards. For instance, the Cary preamp exposed the fact that, on the new mix of “Two of Us,” Ringo’s floor tom has been given quite the EQ boost compared with the original! (Footnote 1) Like everyone else, I blame Paul.

If you’re attracted to small-scale music by the sounds of the instruments as much as by the music itself, then you’ll find lots to enjoy in the Cary’s sound. In much the way that it respected the textures of Frank’s middle-aged voice, the Cary consistently drew my attention to the sweetness of Vadim Gluzman’s violin in Lera Auerbach’s moving T’filah for Solo Violin (CD, BIS CD-1242), or the strangely human sound of Marianne Ronez’ sharper-hued and even more harmonically complex baroque violin in Biber’s Mysterien Sonaten (CD, Winter & Winter CD 910 029-2). Somehow I’ve restrained myself from adding John Cale to that list (Dave Swarbrick is another story).

On the alternate take of The Band’s “Tears of Rage,” from Music from Big Pink (CD, Capitol 5 25390 2), the sense of humanness, of touch, came across in a stronger-than-average way with the Cary in the system. The way Rick Danko slides, very subtly, into most notes on his electric bass, rather than just fretting them dead on, came across nicely, as did the deliberate holding back on the beat that his playing technique effected. And Danko’s falsetto vocal harmonies in the chorus were well separated from Richard Manuel’s lead, not only spatially but in terms of pitch, timing, and inflection.

It was really quite amazing how good Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately,” from the new SACD/CD of Highway 61 Revisited (Sony CH 90324; see also this month’s “Listening” column), sounded with the Cary in the system. It’s a cluttered, clattery arrangement, and even in SACD guise the sound of the recording is mildly unkind to the music. Yet here, the Cary preamp—ironically or not—did to the song what my favorite SET amps do: It found the all-important vocal and pulled it out front of everything else. In the process, the surrounding instruments became somewhat less mechanical and clattery, and the edge (that harmonica!) got smoothed off some: The Cary, though never dull, was consistently free from treble nasties.

And, again, I heard nothing that spoke of problems with rhythm and pacing, or gross timing errors: All the music I tried with the SLP-98P was reliably involving, and my attention didn’t waver—although I thought that leading-edge transients weren’t quite as sharp as I’ve heard with other combinations of electronics in my system. Earl Scruggs’ banjo in the fiddle tune “Soldier’s Joy,” and especially the darker-sounding vintage banjo played by John McEuen on that same cut on Will the Circle Be Unbroken (LP, United Artists UAS 9801), sounded less present and exciting through the Cary than elsewhere.

On other recordings, I noticed the same effect with harpsichords and similar complex musical sounds: a slight blunting, but not so severe that it interfered with timing or flow. Experience tells me it’s possible to make these note attacks sound strong and clean and real without being too sharp in one direction or too mushy in the other, and the Cary erred very slightly toward the mushy, compared to what I consider the best preamps I’ve had in my system: the Linn Klimax Kontrol and the Audio Note M3. In any event, I’m sure many listeners, faced with a choice, would prefer a little too smooth over a little too sharp.

Spatially, the new Cary preamp sounded big—much bigger than my memory of its predecessor. The most obvious effect was that it gave my system a more believable sense of scale with symphonic music. Valery Gergiev’s new recording of Shostakovich’s Symphony 7 (SACD/CD, Philips 470 623-2) seemed to benefit from this, along with the Cary’s distinctly muscular and colorful presentation. And the level of emotional involvement remained excellent: When a visit from a friend forced me to mute the preamp (but only once!), I had the damnedest time tearing myself away from the music.

The SLP-98P’s bigness was welcome with some pop records, too, where studio trickery can be used to take advantage of such things—as on “You Don’t Have to Cry,” from Crosby, Stills & Nash (LP, Atlantic SD-8229): After a couple of tentative bars, Stills’ acoustic guitar opens the piece with a hammer-on that’s double-tracked and panned way to the sides—deliberately, to maximize the effect of that moment, I’d assume. This little phrase sounds impressive with most gear; it was even more so with the Cary.

Conclusions: Read me first!
I was about to wonder whether audiophiles are forever doomed to a hobby in which certain things—certain sounds—go in and out of fashion. But the fact is, I see that as a positive thing. Some listeners want a tube sound, others more solid-state. Others disdain both camps for wanting anything at all apart from the truth—but who’s to say what that is? Smart consumers try, at one time or another, to understand all those points of view, then spend their hard-earned money on whatever makes them happiest. Where’s the doom in it?

Like the blind men and the elephant, everyone comes away from an event with their own piece of the truth, and the bigger and more unfathomable the event, the smaller and more individualized everyone’s truth will be. So it goes with music—and this product, like everything else, comes back with its own take. And I like it. The Cary SLP-98P plays music in a way that respects the notes and beats, and its sound respects and to some extent glorifies many of the things that I respond to in recorded music: Texture. Color. Drama. Scale.

While I’ve heard only a small portion of all the perfectionist audio preamps in the world, I can confidently say that the Cary SLP-98P is a distinct, and distinctly musical, choice. Far from being another me-too preamp in any way, the Cary rewards the tube-friendly listener with a view on the music that I consider not only to my taste, but truthful. That the Cary is priced fairly for what’s gone into it—and a lot lower than most of its worthiest competitors—is no small blessing in itself.

A sweet little preamp? Without question.