Benz Micro Lukaschek PP-1 w/ Cartridge

Winner of the Absolute Sound's Golden Ear Award 2000 for Best Component. Issue 127, December 2000

The small size of the PP-1 allows close placement to the turntable, minimizing signal leads from the tonearm. The whole power supply is inboard the PP-1 chassis except for an external power transformer, which is outboard to eliminate magnetic field interaction.

The miniature size of the PP-1 also allows all circuit components to be very close to one another. This significantly reduces circuit board traces, which could introduce noise and sonic degradation. The PP-1 is optimized for moving coil amplification, thus does not provide switches and or jumpers for gain setting or resistive loading. This elimination of unneeded circuit junction points preserves the low noise/high performance characteristics of this superb phono preamp.

By using only 2 transistors in each amplifier stage, perfect stability and extreme fast transient response is achieved. This provides the high degree of transparency and accuracy of the PP-1. High quality double-sided glass epoxy circuit boards with carefully designed topology (CAD) have been applied in order to ensure shortest possible signal paths. Low noise matched bipolar transistors were selected for this purpose. All resistors are high quality metal film with 1% tolerance. Within the RIAA network, only 1% polystyrene capacitors have been used, with high quality metalized plastic-film capacitors in the coupling function.

Each channel of the input amplifier stage works around a phase non-inverting 2-stage negative feedback amplifier. Available gain is set at 40dB and the upper frequency limit has been set at 650kHz/-3dB. Input impedance has been set at 22k Ohm in order to eliminate interconnect cable and phono connector influence on the sound quality. A 10Hz sub-sonic filter has been incorporated between the input stage and the RIAA equalizer.

I've had a PP-1 for several years, mated to a Benz Reference...its one of the components of my system that I have no intention of changing..very neutral and revealing, just gets out of the way and lets the other components do their thing. Its easy to become infatuated with some component that "adds something", but you'll tire of it's coloration...not so with the PP-1.

Features & Specifications