I received my custom Goldpoint SA2 yesterday, and spent a few hours with it last night. Sounds awesome with the Killerdac.
But I lost bottom end "drive" when running the phono into it (I guess it's a similar situation to what you had with Stevens pot Andy).
There were 2 things running through my mind.
Firstly, I need to run in the pot (the Dale-Vishay resistors need running in).
Secondly, I have a couple of different buffers sitting around, if the lack of drive is due to impedance matching, that's what buffers are intended to fix. Now you can say, what's the point, that's half the reason why an active preamp is a better approach. Lets come back to that thought, as I'm working through a process of elimination.
I put the pot onto my run-in system and let it go for over 24 hours. This morning I went ruffling through my storage room looking for the buffers.
I've been messing around for a couple of hours now, experimenting. I started with my Burson buffer, as that is the most transparent. Indeed the bottom end drive was there. I then put the Audio Fidelity buffer on, and let it warm up. The drive was there, but the music was far too polite. I put the Burson back, and it had more life. Then I took the buffers out, and ran the phono direct. Fark, the bottom end is still there, but everything is better, realism, transparency. I should have baselined my testing with no buffer first, I jumped straight to the buffer approach, figuring that was the solution.
So I pull out 1 of my vinyl rips, run it on the dac, sounding nice, weighty, clear, all the good stuff we know the Killer can do. Then I put the same record on and played it from the TT rig, took a bit of fiddling to volume match, the weight and drive was all very similar to the Dac (maybe just a tad behind in midbass), but there was a bit more top end transparency.
Running in the pot appears to have made a dramatic difference.
Also wondering if my output tubes in the Dac are starting to show signs of age. I'll have to take them up to Stevens and check.
Audio Note is coming out.