A lot of people have looked at my Ultra preamp but no buyers, so I will lower the price to $1850.00. I love this preamp, so if no one is interested at the new price, I will keep it.

What a bargain. At that price, I was certain it would sell. I continue to love my Ultra, though I have recently sent it to Steve for a looksee on a possible problem transformer. Up until a couple of weeks ago, she had performed flawlessly; I am sure that, whatever the issue, it will be rectified. I wonder, however, if the Ultra occupies a very narrowly defined niche in this day and age of nearly all digital, solid-state home theater. It took me a lot of work, and a lot of cables, and a lot of other items to get the Ultra integrated into my home theater, while still permitting its huge advantage of providing 2-channel audiophile stereo. And it was worth every bit of that. That permitted the integration of my Oppo player, Comcast DVR, and AppleTV. Almost all fully remote-controllable, with the exception of when I wanted to switch to my PS Audio DAC. Then, I would have to manually switch the Ultra's input selector. But that was it, and it sounds great.

When I had to box up the Ultra to send to Steve, I decided to fill the gap with an Outlaw 975, a very modestly priced pre/pro unit. No one is going to mistake the Outlaw for high-end audio, but on HD television and AppleTV, where lots of compression/decompression are going on, and who knows what has been done to the audio signal, it is in fact quite serviceable. However, on the Oppo Blu-Ray player, it is noticeably inferior to the Ultra. Especially on what AIX Recordings calls 3D sound.

If you know AIX, then you already know they are doing some pretty cool things with their Blu-Ray recordings in surround sound. And the combination of the Oppo, and the Ultra, and Torii amps is pretty amazing. True, you could do the same thing with direct feeds from the Oppo into Torii amps, because the Oppo 95 DAC [and the new 105] have very good, audiophile-quality DACs inside, but the Ultra affords a matching/balancing capability that I think Steve describes very well in the manual and the history of the Ultra. Suffice it to say that the AIX media in the Oppo running through the Ultra/Torii/ERR+subs combo is sublime. I expect that to only get better when the front ERRs are replaced by HR-1s.

But the minute you want to integrate additional multi-channel sources, life gets a little more complicated. I ended up purchasing an outboard Dolby decoder, and was thinking about significantly upgrading that to a full pre/pro to get the benefits of modern processing. I also located a Zektor MAS7.1 [after trying the 3, the 4.0 and the 4.1], and with those units, I achieved my near-complete remote control. My system worked so reliably well that my 10yo, 16yo, and my girlfriend all could control the system from a single remote control.

But when I swapped in the Outlaw for the Ultra, the convenience experience was fascinating. Don't get me wrong, I am no HDMI fan, but the Outlaw and 3 HDMI cables took the place of the Ultra, the Zektor, the Dolby unit and no less than 18 $100+ Decware, MAC, and Audioquest interconnects. On cable and AppleTV, the sound was very much like before, but with better LFE integration. With good Blue-Ray discs, it was a step down, because the only way to get sound out of the Oppo was through HDMI.

In an all-analog age, the Ultra's integration capability would trump almost anything. And even in a digital/analog time, it is very impressive. But digital is getting better and better. Well recorded high-resolution files sound amazing through my PS Audio PerfectWave DAC [the MkII]. Truly amazing. And the DAC, straight out to the Torii is a very compelling combo. So compelling that I will probably run that for stereo-only, bypassing the Ultra, taking advantage of the Torii's dual inputs. [Love those new monoblocks, but..........sigh.] And if I really get the chance, I would love to devote one room to just an audiophile home theater, the Ultra, with a Blu-Ray, 3 Toriis, 6 ERRs, and a sub—which I have, but without the compromises of integrating all that "other stuff." I could actually solve my media library problem, which is the primary purpose of the AppleTV, through the Oppo itself. It can play a lot of the files stored on the NAS, but not some of the video files purchased through iTunes. However, access to live sports and other events remains a challenge without some form of cable or satellite.

There is real, audiophile quality home theater gear out there, and it appeals to people who probably don't even know about Decware, and even if they did, could hardly believe it would be competitive with their idea of high-end. And so, I think the market size of folks who can see and appreciate what makes the Ultra so special is probably pretty small. That's too bad. I would bet that one day, you might be happy you did not sell your Ultra. I know, that no matter what, I won't. Even if I eventually relegate it to 2-channel pre-only work, I will want to hold on to a very special piece of equipment.

Sorry for hijacking your post MTNDAVE. Cheers!

Pale Rider, you hit the nail on the head. The Ultra is so versatile that at some point in the future, I will be very glad that I deceided not to sell it. Hell, I`m glad now.