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Audio Research Corporation Reference 2 Phonostage Preamp

Audio Research Corporation Reference 2 Phonostage Preamp

The ARC Reference 2—William Zane Johnson’s statement phonostage and only the second ARC phono preamp to be designated a “Reference” product in this decade—arrived about three weeks ago, replete with new features never before seen on an ARC phonostage. One look at the remote control will tell you how different the Reference 2 is.Audio Research Corporation Reference 2 Phonostage Preamp

The push-button loading for moving coils (including a “Custom” setting that ARC will factory-set to any value you want) is a variation on an old theme (the PH7’s remote allows you to do virtually the same thing). But those Input 1 and Input 2 buttons are new (this is the first preamp from ARC in a long time that makes provisions for more than one arm or turntable). Completely unparalleled is the bottom row of buttons labeled “RIAA,” “Columbia,” and “Decca.” In the better than thirty years I’ve been an ARC fan I am not aware of another Johnson preamp with alternative EQ settings. Although I haven’t yet experimented extensively with these different EQs, I know that ARC spent a lot of time fine-tuning them. At the very least, they give analog-hounds the flexibility that was once only available with the FM Acoustics and the Zanden phonostages.

On the outside the unit looks impressive—it’s larger than the Reference 3 preamp and is the first ARC unit I’ve seen that has a silver chassis and silver handles (although it can also be had in ARC’s traditional two-tone silver and black or all-black). Audio Research Corporation Reference 2 Phonostage Preamp

On the inside it looks more like a Reference 3 than a phonostage, in part because it uses the same tube complement as the Reference 3—four 6H30 dual triodes, and one more 6H30 and one 6550C in the power supply.

Gain is user-selectable—51dB in the low gain setting and 74dB in the high gain setting (using the preamp’s balanced outputs). Not only does this mean that you can use moving-magnet cartridges in addition to moving coils; it also means that you can use very-low-output moving coils (which has not always been the case with previous ARC phonostages). In fact, the Reference 2 is a superb match with the very-low-output (0.17mV) Da Vinci Reference Grandezza cartridge that I currently favor.

Bandwidth is claimed to be very wide—within +/-2dB of RIAA from 10Hz to 60kHz, with 3dB down points at 0.5Hz and above 300kHz. I have no way of confirming or challenging these claims but I can say, on the basis of listening, that this phonostage has the deepest, clearest, most natural bass of any tube phonostage I’ve heard.

It takes at least 200 hours to break in the Reference 2’s capacitors, so prepare yourself for a long wait before it begins to sound its best. However, its best is most assuredly worth waiting for. This is, far and away, the finest phonostage ARC has ever made—and the most realistic tube phonostage I’ve ever heard.

Low-level resolution, transient response, timbre, and transparency to sources are phenomenally lifelike, making this one of those rare analog products that reveals new details (and recasts old ones) on every cut of every record in you entire collection. I am still collating when it comes to the Reference 2—and still a little agog at how superb it sounds—but I can already tell you that this isn’t just a half-step or even a whole-step better than the (excellent) PH7. There is an entire octave of difference between the Reference 2 and its little brother. This is just a superb bit of engineering, and Audio Research has every right to call it a “reference” product.

I will have more to say about the Reference 2–its sound, its EQ settings, now it fares against the competition–on this site and on our Golden Ear Club site in the near future.

Tags: AUDIO RESEARCH

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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