Certified preowned Any great line-stage must possess transparency, ultra-low noise performance and absolute stability. It must anchor the incoming signals and deliver them onwards, propelled from a firm footing that ensures dynamic and musical authority. It must pass the source signals in your system, without limitation or disturbance, leaving no trace of itself on them passage. Any great line-stage needs to be the next best thing to sonically and musically invisible, the hi-fi equivalent of effortlessly enacting its own audio superpower.Like all CH Precision products, the L1 uses fully discrete, balanced and complementary design, ultra-short signal paths andexactingly selected components. It is fed from heavily regulated and filtered power supplies, is wide-bandwidth, high slew-rateand DC coupled. But in this critical application, that’s not enough. It’s one thing to eliminate unnecessary components from thesignal path and eliminate DC offset at the inputs, but the L1 takes things much, much further than that. Completely separate left and right channel circuit boards prevent crosstalk, while a supersophisticated, software driven R-2R network for each channelemploys precision metal-film resistors and allows precise level control in 0.5dB steps with the minimum possible number of components. DC offset is monitored and eliminating not justat the inputs but throughout the volume control ladder and at multiple points throughout the entire circuit. That makes the L1 not just one of the quietest line-stages ever built, it makes it one of the quietest in operation too. For a company that is renowned for the flexibility and configurable nature of its products, it is ironic that one of our most musically vital components is also our least adaptable. Although the L1 line-stage has an inherently modular topology, it offers only line-level inputs and comes fully loaded as standard. But that doesn’t mean that the L1 isn’t scalable and upgradable, with the option to add a second chassis for true-monaural operation and one or two X1 external power supplies. Of course, the L1 is fully controllable via the CH-Control App, its inputs can be labeled, you can set overall gain as well as individual input offsets and you can even select a DC blocking capacitor on any input if necessary. But at heart, in terms of signal transfer the L1 is as stripped down and purist as it can possibly be. You can hear that in its performance: you will hear it in any system that’s built around an L1, whether in one, two, three or four-box form. As elegant in design as it is sophisticated in operation, as musically commanding as it is unobtrusive, the L1 brings a whole new sense to the motto, “We hide with pride!”
