Audio Refinement Pre-2 DSP (1 Viewer)

[Orin Dym]

I have received enough requests that I have scanned the manual and made it available for download. You can get it by going to my web (www.okdym.com) and following the Home Theater link--Enjoy.

 

[Brian Corr]

How do you like it?
Have you had other pre/pro's to judge it against?
Can it do DD EX or DTS ES 6.1? HOw about DTS Neo and/or DPLII?
sorry for all the questions, you'd think I was 5!

 

[Orin Dym]

Well, you should download the manual and read it. It is a basic 5.1 preamp except it is standard Audio Refinement sound--very smooth, very nice. It is supposedly unreadable to 6.1.

I have had the opportunity to compare it to the ADA Cinema Rhapsody, Audio Refinement Multi-5, Marantz AV-9000, and the Sony TAE-9000ES.

The major benefit of this preamp (being mainly a 2 channel person) is its quality of stereo sound. I use an Audio Refinement CD player analogue bypass through the DSP-2 and find the sound to be equivalent to that of the Multi-5. Movie decoding is as good as the ADA.

On the down-side, it is a very basic no frills unit (A major plus to me). DD/DTS is auto detect (and actually works very well). I have never lost lock during a movie, not even during layer changes.4 analog (One is 5.1)and 4 digital inputs. Any of the analog inputs can be bypassed so they behave very much like a wire with gain. It really is a set and forget unit.

In analog bypass mode the unit is very quite. I find there to be a bit of noise on the digital side, but not enough to interfere with sound quality.

The units display is a bit small and I can not read it from my seat. The remote is very basic and non programmable.

The DSP-2 is everything I wanted in a preamp--It gets out of the way of the sound.