VTL 7.5 MK III

Description

This is one opf the top 5 BEST PRE-AMPS money can buy!

More than eight years after introducing the TL-7.5 Reference preamplifier to universal acclaim, VTL presents the latest version, the TL7.5 Series III. The new model incorporates numerous technological advances while retaining the best elements of the TL-7.5 platform. The proven strengths of the original system architecture include: a fully balanced differential design; a hybrid circuit that combines tubes in the gain stage for voltage linearity (less than 2dB NFB) with a MOSFET buffer for greater current capacity; a high resolution volume control; and a clean box/dirty box architecture with multiple precision-regulated power supplies. The highly-regarded user interface of the TL7.5 platform sets the standard for intuitiveness, and ease of use.

The Series III builds on improvements made to the Series II for an even higher level of performance. The new design features an extensively revised power supply based on current-sourced shunt regulator technology that minimizes impact on the audio signal by eliminating high voltage gain. Far more precise power regulation yields dramatically improved rejection of noise and AC fluctuation.

The completely redesigned high current gain stage utilizes newly available FET technology developed for green technologies such as solar panels and electric cars that require a normally-on state. Unlike MOSFETs that need to be biased on, normally-on devices operate more like vacuum tubes in the audio output stage, with simpler circuits that continuously conduct current, resulting in a more tube-like sound. The high-current gain stage has been further optimized for linearity with zero global negative feedback in the circuit.

Also included in the upgrade are new specially selected audiophile grade capacitors and a fully bi-directional RS-232 control interface for increased compatibility with modern home theater systems.

Enhancements to the Series III result in an even higher level of coherence, integration and transparency of sound, with dramatically improved mid-bass and midrange, and a more tube-like sonic character.

https://vtl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/VTL-TL7.5-III-Roy-Gregory-UK-HiFi-plus-issue-97.pdf

https://www.vtl.com/products/preamplifiers/tl7-5-series-iii-reference-preamplifier/

Quantifying the indescribable

n my October 2003 review of the first ‘7.5 for Stereophile, I vented some frustration about the review process, bemoaning the fact that it was extraordinarily difficult to describe the sound of a component that had less intrinsic character than any other I had reviewed to that time. I now find myself confronted with the same frustration — times two. As you might have deduced, the TL-7.5 Series III is very much more of the kind of rare and serious excellence that VTL brought to the first ‘7.5 more than ten years ago. It is the finest line stage I have heard, tube or solid-state. It does more — by doing less to the signals that pass through it — than any piece of audio equipment I have heard to date. This is one of the supreme paradoxes of superb music reproduction. The more one invests, the less the equipment ideally does to the music.

The Series III does much less, in that sense, than any line stage of my acquaintance and therein lies its true greatness. There is greater detail retrieval — of the characteristics of space, of the finest dynamic gradations, of minuscule timbral variations — than the competition I have heard. It sounds clichéd to say merely that it has less of a sound than any other component — just as the original had some ten years ago — but there is really nothing more accurate or germane that I can write. Logic dictates that it is not perfect. No human-made instrumental can be. And one day it will be bettered, as surely as the sun arises in the east. But today the TL-7.5 Series III somehow manages to combine the full portfolio of harmonic virtues that only tubes can provide, even at this late day, with the kind of bandwidth and speed of the very finest solid state.

As obvious as the Series III’s multiple strengths — and virtually non-existent weaknesses — are, what left me marveling most about listening to music through it were the things that had always been there for the hearing but which the big VTL made so much more obvious: the slinky, strip-joint swing of the bass and muttering rhythm guitar on “Clever Trevor” from Ian Dury’s New Boots, the dancing, distant woodwinds — all by themselves, way back in the orchestra — in the middle of the Meistersinger Prelude, to name but two. The ‘7.5 simply made it easier, much easier, to pay attention to all of the threads in the fabric of music — and to hear that music as a complete entity.

Components with this kind of resolution too often approach the task of music reproduction with the fanatical attention to detail of Sir Joseph Blaine, the fictional spymaster in Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin novels of the Napoleonic-era British navy. Sir Joseph was obsessed with beetles and their individual particulars, a taxonomist by nature and inclination. The problem with audio components of the taxonomic inclination is that while they manage to describe, in exquisite detail, the particulars of every bug or tree in the musical forest, they cannot manage to encompass the majesty and beauty of the forest’s entirety. The handful that can manage to do both — shortchanging nothing dynamically, timbrally, spatially or emotionally — communicate the unalloyed experience of music to the extent it can be recorded and reproduced.

Reproduced music can transcend such parsing — can be transcendent itself. The late Leonard Bernstein famously said that music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable, and to my view that describes those magic moments better than I ever could. I nearly drove my car off the freeway the first time I heard Patti Smith’s “Because the Night” (on AM radio). The song was that powerfully immediate to me. I believe we audiophiles spend so much time and treasure on our stereo systems in order to re-create moments like that on a regular basis. Unfortunately the road to such experiences is filled with detours, dead ends, speed bumps, potholes and frustrations. But there are those times when the transcendence we seek from our favorite music arrives.

What puzzles and delights me is the existence of that special handful of components that make transcendence almost commonplace, even with recordings that are the essence of commonplace. Such components are not found often and the number that have done this in my audio lifetime would amount to a rather short list. The original TL-7.5 was one of them, and the TL-7.5 Series III Reference currently stands at the front of that very small pack.