by GP49 Sun May 22, 2011 4:34 am
Impedance, impedance, impedance. Rule of thumb: the lower the impedance of the circuit, the larger the coupling capacitors must be to maintain response in the bass. You may run your preamp with a low-impedance input on a transistor power amp, so the manufacturer has to provide for that possibility.
That's where the classic Dynaco PAS is often inadequate. It can't properly drive a power amp with less than 25K input impedance, and many modern transistor amplifiers fall into that category. Even that operation requires internal modification. And its phono preamp can't handle the low impedance of most transistorized tape decks, cordless headphone interfaces and computer sound cards. Of course, none of those existed when the PAS circuit was first designed as the PAM mono preamp. Heck, TRANSISTORS didn't exist, back then.