Very little info on this new EAR phono preamp other than this blurb from Stereophile's report from High End Munich. Looks as if there may not be any tube based circuits (just guessing). Art's Thursday in Munich, Part Two
I wouldn’t conclude from the photo that there are no tubes. The 834 is also compact and it has three tubes.
Could be but it does look smaller than the 834 and somewhat "solid state" like. Reminds me of the new Parks Audio phono preamp which is disappointing a lot of people in advance
The 834 replacement is already available at this German dealer for testing. Neu im Sortiment Anything you guys know about it since I cannot find any additional information about it...
That's what I thought as well. But still it's strange that it's already out there at some dealers without finding a single word about it on the whole internet!
My dealer who sells ungawdly expensive stuff absolutely loves Tim's products especially the old EAR phono and appreciates his genius. It has to be good!
Very nicely designed phono preamp, but it went from being a reasonably priced phono-pre to one that is priced way beyond what it should be sold for, given the modest cost to produce it.
Well, if this is what pricing is about almost everything we buy should cost just a fraction of the asking price. You pay for the sound, not for the material
Actually, I do pay for sound, it's just that I don't choose to overpay for the material it takes to produce it. The Decware ZP3 is a lot more phono preamp than the Ear834 ever thought about being, it is 2/3 of the price of the Ear and is built to order.
Fremer has a short clip of this in one of his axpona videos. The rep that's talking about doesn't seem to know much about it but says it's an updated 834 with optional volume control. Presumably that means 12a*7 but I'm skeptical. As mentioned before the case size doesn't look tall enough for that.
Ear 834 in black case sold for around £300 25 years ago and considered a budget bargain. Silver version was always much more. New model in Black is around £1400 I think. Volume/gain knob used to always be a an option. I would say price increase is double inflation because EAR doubled all their UK prices to equal export prices to far east. I believe foreign buyers were buying from Uk dealers. I would have thought it was fairly easy to prevent selling outside Uk via internet. Thing is world prices have to look the same so the domestic UK buyer gets screwed. No wonder hi-fi is not a popular hobby here as in the past. Hardly encourages people to ditch smart phones in favour of real sound. Most of these posh UK brands rely on far east export market so local consumers are not that important to them.
Here in Germany, as the link shows, the price for the silver version is about 2000 Euro. So equals the one of the old EAR 834p deluxe.
Just talked to the dealer. It's a tube preamp. Three tubes as in the 834p. However, it's not ECC83 anymore. The dealer said you can still use the ECC83 but then you have to change one jumper inside to a different position. He said one should not expect major improvements in comparison to the original 834p, maybe a bit more resolution.
