THE AUDIO ASYLUM FORUM TYPE "PLACETTE" IN THE SEARCH BOX

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Placette Audio Preamplifier: Transparency, Transparency, Transparency

For someone as obsessed with low noise and transparency as Hammel, he surprised me by his inclusion of a remote, given the kind of noise relays are said to radiate. Not for nothing have designers at Levinson and McIntosh begun putting the switching and remote receivers into separate enclosures from the audio circuitry. Hammel, though, has taken a different, rather novel approach. The remote operates the relay only, which in turn selects the combination of resistors that determines level; the receiver itself remains in an analog sleep mode, awakening only when you instruct it to perform a new task. Once the task is carried out, it reverts to sleep mode. Nifty.⁵

The unique volume arrangement will not be to all tastes. Volume is controlled by combinations of resistors. There are 126 discrete steps that, with one caveat, permit as fine a resolution of volume as you could ask. Level is visually indicted by a column of LEDs on the face of the preamplifier; next to this column is a toggle switch that lets you make gross adjustments at the chassis, but the full 126 steps are accessible only via the remote. As you press the volume up or down, each step is announced with a small click. The top LED is red; when this is reached, the yellow LEDs start reading from the bottom again, only now indicating a correspondingly higher level. This sounds more complicated than it proves in use, which turned out to be surprisingly intuitive and quick to grasp. Still, I have friends who love the sound of the preamplifier but find the operation of the volume control annoying.

More serious is the Placette's lack of fine volume adjustment at the first few settings (which drives my wife crazy). The first stop up from silence is entirely too large, and the next couple of steps after that offer less fine gradations than I would like. Keep in mind, however, that the levels I am talking about here are far lower than those at which normal listening would occur. Still, if you like to listen late at night, it could be a concern. Hammel makes an outboard pair of male/female connectors he calls "Snubbers" that use more resistors to attenuate the overall output. He also says the design has some latitude to tailor the output to the individual sensitivities of most power amplifiers. Given the 30-day home trial, prospective buyers will have more than enough time to see if either option is necessary in their system.

Otherwise, I am delighted to report that this volume control is altogether an amazing invention. At anything above a super-quiet level, it offers the finest resolution of output than any I know. It's not until you've enjoyed tracking this precise that you realize how often you've put up with shall channel-to-channel imprecisions as settings vary. About all I wish is that Hammel would consider replacing his stacked LEDs with a numerical read-out a la Levinson or Sim Audio, so that any given level can be returned quickly just by referencing a number.

The Placette is rather plain Jane: strictly utilitarian black case, nothing to impress the polished chrome-and-brass crowd. The expense has gone inside, in the quality of parts and hand assembly. And there are niceties that are not immediately apparent: The unit comes supplied with Sorbothane feet; the circuitboards are mounted on Sorbothane and granite; the wiring is given an epoxy coating to minimize vibration and other movement; and various damping compounds are used elsewhere. (Hammel is big on isolation via damping, as opposed to hard, pointed feet.) A nice touch is a back-panel switch that allows the ground to be floated: Hammel is as obsessed with vanishingly low noise and hum as he is with transparency. "It must be perfect," he says, and once traveled Boise, Idaho to Seattle when a Placette owner couldn't eliminate a ground loop. Hammel guarantees each unit absolutely for ten years and has not found any instances of adjustments going awry in the field. Customer satisfaction appears to be extremely high.

So what does this thing sound like? To be brief, under circumstances that I can control or am otherwise familiar with, I haven't heard a better preamplifier than the Placette. Whether its transparency is owing to the 50 Vishay resistors, the unique volume configuration, the extra mechanical damping, or all of these, I cannot say, but is unquestionably there. I directly compared it to at least four other preamplifiers (by Quicksilver, Bryston, Electrocompaniet, and Plinius) and the only one that came close to holding its own was the Plinius (a relatively inexpensive older model that, alas, is no longer made). It's a cliché to say that veils are lifted, but they really are lifted.

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⁵  Hammel also says that "because all of our internal wiring is configured as twisted pairs, it is very immne to radiated noise and crosstalk. Besides, noise can be radiated from the control wires coming in and out of the box, so twisted-pair wiring is much more important than shielding. Also, we use separate power supplies for the controller and another for the rest of the control system. But the important thing here is that these are the quietest preamps available today, with a noise at the outputs of about 1.4 to 1.8 microvolts."

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