Perreaux SXV1

Vinyl lives into the 21st Century

By Michael Wong

November 2003

Perreaux SXV1 phono preamplifier. $699

It’s quite remarkable that despite being “replaced” by CD some 20 years ago, there is continued interest in vinyl records and vinyl related equipment. Even as we stand on the edge of the new digital abyss that is high resolution digital audio, companies have enough faith and consumer support to continue releasing new analog product across all price and quality points. It was recently written in Stereophile that vinyl outsold the new digital formats three to one for the first six months of 2003.

Into this era of renewed vinyl interest New Zealand audio veteran Perreaux has introduced the Silhouette SXV1 Phono Preamplifier. This is a modestly priced, self-contained unit (similar in size and appearance to last month’s SXH1 headphone amplifier). It accepts a low level phono signal, peforms RIAA equalization and then amplifies the signal to a high enough level to go into a typical line-level input.

It arrived in a stylish black box wrapped up not in the usual plastic but a piece of black cloth, just like a precious family heirloom.

The plain black box has only an embossed Perreaux logo offering relief to the plain front panel. Around the back we have the main power switch, IEC mains plug (uniquely at this price point the Perreaux has an on-board power supply), gold plated RCAs for input/output, the earth binding post and two banks of DIP switches. These switches endow the SXV1 with cartridge matching flexibility unseen at this price point. Load impedance, capacitance and gain are adjustable over a wide range of values. With the SXV1 almost any cartridge should be usable.

Kudos to Perreaux for making the adjustments so easily accessible. There are none of the blindspots that plague some manufacturers who sadistically provide useful facilities and then burden them with joke ergonomics.

Source was a tweaked Well Tempered Turntable/Arm/Sumiko Blue Point Special (with a brief guest appearance by a Koetsu Red). The Perreaux fed a Krell KAV-300i. Reference phono stage was an original all-wood bodied Plinius Jarrah, a well established benchmark for affordable High End phono stages.

Needle hits groove…

Straight out of the box the Perreaux was unimpressive. The sound was small in scale, dynamically compressed, thin, washed out and woefully lifeless. Patience and perseverence are two of the reviewer’s tools of trade, so for the next few days all manner of vinyl found its way onto the turntable as the Perreaux warmed up.

Take two

By day four things had improved enough for some serious listening to begin. The Perreaux was a still a little lean sounding, with slightly shut-in high frequencies.

The soundstage presented was noticeably smaller than the Plinius. Imaging was nicely spread across the stage, not quite pin-sharp, a tad two-dimensional and confined to the physical boundaries of the speakers. Transparency was fair at the front of the stage, diminishing as you looked further back.

Tonally it was all rather grey. The bass while having gained adequate extension, was lacking in impact and thrown further back in the mix. The overall result was a sound that didn’t capture the joie de vivre of real music.

Zzzzzz…

There just wasn’t the excitement or toe tapping tunefullness that good vinyl playback is capable of. Flat earthers would say there was a distinct lack of PRAT (pace, rhythm and timing). Everything sounded sat-on and lacklustre. Music lost the sense of power and occassion.

The lack of dynamic alacrity was painfully exposed on John Cougar Mellencamp’s Cherry Bomb. Listen to the opening rimshot. There should be SNAP! and liveliness that grabs the listener’s attention with its realism. Mellencamp and co. should sound like they are having fun reminiscing the good ol’ days. Not this time. Ditto Joe Morello’s explosive drum solo on the Dave Brubeck Quartet classic Take Five was emasculated and became very so what? (and I don’t mean the classic Miles Davis tune).

On to Russian powermeisters Prokofiev and Rimsky-Korsakov; in particular Lt. Kije and Sheherazade, the tonal colours, sense of scale and sheer power inherent in these beautiful pieces just was not there. If the Caliph had heard Sheherazade through this preamp there would have been no delay in chopping off her head.

No fun zone!

As much as I admired the Perreaux’ flexibility and affordability, the bottom line has to be whether a component brings the listener closer to the music. Last month’s Wadia CDP did just that. It compelled you to put on CD after CD. Not so with the Perreaux. It just wasn’t fun to listen, in fact after a few hours I stopped listening to vinyl and played some CDs.

Editor's note: AudioEnz has asked Perreaux to check that the review sample was up to spec. To date we have received no response from Perreaux.