Pale Rider
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Lon's piece (including Steve's stuff) about riding the gain is dead on.
I think everyone knows I use the Ultra as a preamp. It's being fed by the PWD Mk II, an AppleTV, an Oppo BDP-95, and a Comcast DVR. The Ultra feeds two Torii Mk III amps for the front and rear, an 84ZS for the center channel, and a Taboo (for headphone listening). In order to get the benefit of all this stuff, and the surprising amount of 5.1 material on Comcast, as well as the ATV, the SVR and ATV run through a Dolby digital decoder. The PWD goes straight into the Ultra for 2-channel only. The other units then all feed into a Zektor MAS7.1 switch which then feeds the 6-channel A input of the Ultra. All this stuff resides on two ZRACKs. Listeners are surrounded by 6 ERRs, none more than a few feet away from any listener. Power is regenerated by two PS Audio Power Port Premiers.
If I turn every single component up to max volume, I can hear a bit of hum, but that would be an ear-splitting volume. At anything remotely listenable without pain, even in the quietest of well-recorded passages, I have no hum. My Toriis are set roughly at halfway, while my Ultra is typically 1/3 of full. I don't say this to boast—after all, it's not my achievement—but only to say that hum is not inherent in the design. I have a lot of quality cables running around "back there," and if there was going to be a hum opportunity, I ought to have it.
I have definitely noticed that some tubes are much more microphonic than others, and presumably some tube types and makes are more likely to contribute to hum than others. Tube combinations on these units are nearly infinite. Hum induced by specific tubes could be maddening to track down I guess.
At the end of the day, even if the Ultra had no switching role in my system, the improvement in dynamic headroom is worth having. My system simply does not sound the same without the Ultra.
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