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The Gearhead: Straight To The Source
One of the cool things about being in the position to evaluate and listen to a plethora of hifi equipment from all over audio’s past is coming across unique and exquisite-sounding products from small companies.
Often this is where some of the great fun of being an audiophile lives. You see creative, even ground-breaking design choices, and in many cases the entire company is a small handful of people — or sometimes just one brilliant guy.
If you’ve got a question about a product, these small companies can be easy to reach, and exceedingly helpful and knowledgeable. If you want to upgrade, chances are they’ve got ideas about where to start.
At The Music Room, we strive to provide accurate information about every product we sell, and when it was my turn to test and evaluate this vintage MFA Luminescence tube preamplifier seen above, I quickly realized I was looking at a modified unit, compared to examples I could find in my research online.
The indicators were right in my face: Expensive V-Caps all over the place, Rike Audio capacitors and Mundorf capacitors as well, and small value REL (Reliable Capacitor) caps to boot. If you’ve ever slid down the slippery upgrade & tweak slide, as I have in my own DIY creations, you know these are some of the absolute cream of the crop when it comes to signal capacitors.
A tube preamplifier with a full tubed power supply and strange tube types like 6DN7, 6EN7 and 6EJ7 quickly made me realize I’d have to get serious about finding the right information about this product, no matter the time expense. What’s in this thing IS what’s going to make it sell — at least that was my thinking before I heard the piece of gear.
Because MFA (Moore, Frankland & Associates) is no longer in existence as an audio company, I was initially worried that I would not be able to fully identify all of the modifications.
Enter one of the original designers, Scott Frankland. Scott was kind enough to respond to my email questions so thoroughly, and offer so much extra information about this unit that after a single exchange with him I was 100% certain I had all of the requisite info needed to give this thing the best listing it could have.
While accurate information is essential to selling something that has been modified, once I had a chance to fire this preamplifier up and hear it I instantly understood what it is that truly makes it a memorable product.
The sound. My goodness, the sound of this preamplifier is so beautiful, the audio memory sticks in my mind like a tattoo, and I still talk about it from time to time with hifi friends. I even mentioned this preamplifier’s sound on a podcast or two with my podcasting partner, hifi engineer Darren Myers.
Dynamic, effortless, detailed and involving music floating in space is what we’re all after in this hobby. If I’ve ever heard one component be able to contribute all of that to an otherwise mid-fi setup and elevate the entire experience, it was with this Luminescence. Placed in a true high performance system, I can only imagine the results.