MASTER Tape Head Preamp

The Merrill Audio MASTER Tape Head Preamplifier design is to be the ultimate in Tape Reproduction of Master Tapes. With Master Tapes, there is a great deal of information, a huge Dynamic Contrast between the loud and the soft, much faster transients and immediacy. Voice, strings, percussions, horns all play with greater ease. The room echo provides lingering decay as does the sound boards of the Guitar, Piano and strings. There are rich, abundant harmonics from the musical instruments that are highly complex and integrated. All of this must be kept intact and separated, without masking another, without removing detail and decay, while being natural, have the ability to provide instantaneous transients.

To get all the details and decay, the noise floor had to be invisible. For the transients to be instantaneous the power supply should appear limitless, and the music to be reproduced faithfully the power supply had to be clean. To accomplish this a 5 stage power supply is engaged, with the first stage done externally to remove any noise from the AC power source. Once the removal of noise from the power regulation was done, the power had to provide feed to instantaneous transients with the feel of unlimited power.

The Tape Head Outputs range from 0.4mV to 4mV. The MASTER Tape Head Preamp is designed to operate from 0.1mV to 6mV. The Audio Signal is amplified 3, 500 times using 0.1% tolerance components and custom designed multilayer board using advanced Computer Aided Design software. The Circuit Board was hand designed using the CAD software is to identify and isolate noise sources. All Parasitic impedances which are detail and decay destroyers, has to be removed. The Hand Designed Circuit Board using CAD software to make sure each of the parasitic impedances were avoided.

The result was the Merrill Audio MASTER Tape Head preamplifier that reproduces with full integrity every nuance, detail and decay to present at full 3 dimensional stage with superb 3 dimensional staging and simply the best immediacy that is available from tape.

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