No it’s not, unfortunately. Pandora is far superior IMHO.
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Interesting. I’ll investigate further…
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Having investigated further, you’re correct.
The Essence Pre appears to be a re-packaged Zena Pre in an Essence casing.
Apologies.
Nonetheless, the Essence Pre/Stereo combo sounded great in the demo, so I wonder what sonic benefits would be achieved by going for the Pandora Pre instead?
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Are you guys adding a preamp because you have other components to integrate or are you only running the dCS gear through it. My dealer wants to bring one out but I just don’t see the need. I guess I can try it and see what it does but seems superfluous in my case.
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I have other gear as well but an external preamp is far superior to dac direct IMHO. I’ve auditioned both at length.
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The Pandora is superior in all areas, including bass control, dynamics and transparency. The Pandora is a dual mono design and is composed of two separate chassis, with a discrete power supply. Can you audition both preamps in your own system? That’s what I did.
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I’m adding the preamp because it sounds ‘better’ to my ears (I know that’s counterintuitive, as it’s adding another component in the signal path).
Also, I want to be able to take advantage of the ‘green bias’ function for background listening…
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Thanks.
I’m aware that the Pandora has a separate power supply which, theoretically at least, should lower noise, thus improving the SQ.
The Essence Pre is also a dual mono design.
I’ll try to arrange an A/B comparison.
Unfortunately, my dealer doesn’t allow home demos,…
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@Bauer - the other thing is that, as much as I wanted to love the green bias, I never use it even when I listen to music at low volume. IMO it’s not even comparable to full blast class A.
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@Frankie67 I did wonder about that!
However, the pragmatic part of my brain is telling me that I need to have ‘green bias’, whilst the emotional/musical cortex is saying ‘keep it in Class A’ all the time!
We’ll see which wins.
Of course, it will probably vary from day to day, in line with one’s mood/general disposition…
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Well…absolutely beautiful stereo, stunning listening room, I guess the musicality of the whole must be a dream…But…When you listen to music, I guess the rest of the family is standing still behind you 
Could be a little bit less perfect and a little bit more family or friend compatible…But again, congratulations, very few people on earth have such a stereo, even on this forum, which is already a forum of stereo-fortunate people !
No family, just me!
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Although some of my components are different and my room treatments custom, i find when i give up the golden seat i am quite surprised how much depth and layering i get in an alternate seat. Precision centering and instrument location is different but still quite captivating
Hi John,
That is a great system!
Why don’t try a Stromtank for the DCS Vivaldi system? You can remove you grid doing so, Attention to the system electric supply and grounding, transforms a great system to a spectacular one. The same happens with system setup and room acoustics, but those were cover beautifully already.
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I looked into that and WOW pretty cool. I ran this by my dealer as well as the PS Audio regenerator. They said that they have heard them both and they are unimpressed and they will significantly degrade the system. (I wonder if they were running the amps through these devices as well as components?) I don’t understand. Isn’t pure, clean sine wave power what we all want? How could that degrade the sound. Wouldn’t it be better to filter out all the possible noise form the other devices plugged into the same circuit (wifi satellite, iPad charger, smart plug and 12v trigger device to turn the amps on remotely.) I think PS Audio has a 30 day trial so I could try that. Not sure about Stromtak but probably not.
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On low-power front-end devices, I found my previous PS Audio P5 to be beneficial, especially on my Meridian processor.
On high-power devices that involved amps (such as their speakers), it was quite the opposite. Sadly, it’s not easy to try a PS Audio P15 in this country, but that could/should of course be significantly better.
I’m a great fan of Shunyata, but would love to hear the AQ as well as the Stromtank one day too.
PS Shunyata say the reason many power conditioners don’t sound as good as one might expect is because the instantaneous current available is reduced by the impedance of the conditioner.
In other words, while some conditioners can clean up the power, they also limit the maximum current available (which becomes noticeable during transients in the music when an amp can take huge gulps of power in a very short period of time).
I’m only paraphrasing what Shunyata say, but it sounds entirely plausible.
The benefit of the PS Audio Regeneration is low output impedance. That said I’ve used their regeneration for 6 years and I wouldn’t be without it. I run my 300 watt monoblocs out of twenty amp dedicated outlets and my source devices including my Bartók are on the regenerator.
I have no comment on the efficacy of the regenerator but draw your attention to the safety notice in the Bartok manual.
dCS do not recommend the use of regenerators. However if you do use one and it allows variable voltage and frequency ( which I understand PS Audio ones do) it must be set to match your local voltage and frequency of 50 or 60 Hz only. Any resultant damage caused by misuse or malfunctioning will not be covered by the warranty.
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Very good point.
I believe the more recent PS Audio models top up the mains supply via a power amp as opposed to regenerating it from scratch, so I doubt it’s possible on these models to change the frequency.
I don’t think I could on the P5.