Phoenix Gold 8V line driver pre-amp on ebay. Q for our audio gurus.

[gucio69]

http://cgi.ebay.com/PHOENIX-GO...l1262

I've stumbled across this on ebay. Since many people have been saying how beneficial it is to have pre-amp outputs that work at a higher voltage to help avoid interference I was wondering how useful this would be. I'm guessing it is not as good as having a headunit that has pre-amps at 5V, and frankly I thought that at the price it's quite likely that this is just a piece of garbage. However, I still wanted to get opinions of fellow members who have more experience in the A/V area than I do.

[vballer22]

I havnt seen this one before, but It looks like a ground loop isolator with a little built in amplifier for the pre amps. Probably not a noticable difference. And it won't make your amp go WAY louder like they claim, your amp is only gonna go louder if it gets more power, not more signal. The head unit doesnt send power to the amp, per say, it sends a signal to tell the amp what to do. The 2v, 5v, etc. output is not for power, its for cleanliness of the signal. If you've got the extra cash, by all means get then let us know what you think, but i'd just buy a kenwood with the 5v output instead of that.

[gucio69]

Thanks for the response. I hadn't really intended to buy this, I was more interested on whether this was even viable piece of equipment. What made me look at it closer was what you mentioned in the 2nd part of your post and that would be signal clarity.

[vballer22]

Glad to help. Bottom line, this isn't by any means something any audio guru or installer is gonna tell you is an essential. Even if you have a 2v output from the HU, which by the way is what I have, it's still fine. Alpine makes some absolutely fantastic HU's and if I'm not mistaken they're all 2v outputs, and anyone will tell you that alpines are some of the best all around sounding units.

The only way I can see this being of help, is on extremely expensive component speakers used for competition or testing, where clarity is king and every last db can make a huge difference. I don't think I would be able to tell the difference by listening to 5v and 8v output if it was on the same hu and amp and speakers.