The return of the 01a stage
I remember my first 01a pre-amplifier to be one of the best sounding ones I ever had. The uniqueness of its tone, detail and clarity was astonishing. Perhaps it is due to the warm tone it provides and I guess this is the reason why Thomas Mayer branded his design as the “sound processor”. I fell in love with the sound of a CX-301a and the joy of listening to this stage was so great that I found a fantastic excuse now to re-build this stage. My Starlight Discrete DAC has a very low output due to the step down transformer it has. I can only get 500mV as maximum output level. Not enough to drive my system to full level. This was a perfect argument for me to look at building a simple amplifier stage that could add the sonority of the 01a in my system.
