Live Video Tutorials
Benchmark Discusses What Makes a Good Preamp
An Impossible Engineering Task?
Our goal was to produce an analog volume control with the highest achievable transparency. We wanted to be able to place this volume control in front of our AHB2 power amplifier or in front of our THX-888 headphone amplifier without diminishing the performance of either device.
Our volume control would need to have lower distortion and lower noise than either of these amplifiers. Given the extraordinary performance of these THX-AAA amplifiers, this would not be an easy task!
Our unique solution is a fully-balanced, low-impedance, relay-controlled attenuator with over 256 steps. Nothing like this was ever built, and nothing else matches the performance of the Benchmark analog volume control system used in the LA4 and HPA4 products.
The LA4 is not Just a "Good Preamp"
The LA4 was an all-out effort to build the best line-level preamplifier on the planet.
"Benchmark's LA4 is the widest-bandwidth, widest-dynamic-range, lowest-noise, lowest-distortion preamplifier I have encountered." - John Atkinson
Watch as Benchmark's lead Engineer, John Siau, takes us on a deep dive into the relay-controlled preamplifiers inside Benchmark's LA4 and HPA4.