> 50dB at the input, no clip? (maybe dB uV)
I think he says "15". 4.3V or 5.6V depending if he meant to say dBu or dBV.
I think an audio lab that can't pump more than 5V into a box is a pretty poor thing. For the price of the shirt he's wearing (twisted all out of shape by that gator-clip mike; should have worn a button-shirt), he could score an H-P 200AB and pump 25V. Or since this preamp probably OUTputs more than 5V, probably over 10V, he could run 0.1 into one channel and get 10V, run that into the other channel.
I have NO problem with a mike pre that will swallow "+15dB_". Unless you put dynamics next to explosives, it is rare to get +10dBu. I just don't see boasting "we don't know" on something so easily knowable.
Awful lot of empty space in the OT winding windows. That's not bad; just means he's using standard power transformer stampings in a non-standard way. It's plenty big enough for modern studio work.
BS? No flux capacitors, no silver-foil virgin-oil capacitors, no bifurcate grain-free silver-palladium, doesn't optimize fluty spaciounesss, won't incubate efficient down-to-bedrock solidity. He's selling a box, not an engineering presentation. It's a $10 amp and $10 OT, probably well ear-tweaked, in a very nice box. That's $40 raw amp-parts and significantly more for box and knobs. In the small-audio racket, a $465 selling price is NOT excessive, may not even be long-term profitable. You build it yourself with equivalently nice parts and drillings, you'll have $300 of sweat and blood invested. If he's really assembling in Chicago, this is cheap.
It is interesting he compares to a Germanium and a Tube preamp. I would expect those to be "flavored", his box to be "transparent".
The ordering process is odd. It's made to order, it is in "such high demand", yet the order-cancellation refund policy is brutal. With high demand, surely a cancelled order can just go to the next-in-line customer? And clearly the customer is his banker: he accepts your cash now and won't deliver for 2 months. In this economy, at his scale, he may not have any other source of capital. Big companies should not run that way; but his operation is smaller than some of the studios and producers he sells to, so an inverted capital plan may be best.
