Since a view days I am enjoying the Soulnote E-2 phonostage.
In the front line of my listening room are 4 turntables placed,
which I change from time to time. the most of them are a kind of vintage, like Kenwood L-07, Basis Debut or Technics SL-1000mkii
The last year an Allnic H-5000 was in heavy use, but as 8m of interconnect to the preamp need to be driven, I started to look for a phonostage with xlr connections and 4 inputs plus a powerful outputstage to drive long cables.
on one of the small local high end fairs I became aware of Soulnote and liked the presentation a lot. The sound reminds me to my beloved phasemation gear, but with 4 inputs plus full power xls outputs.
Compared to my former Allnic the Soulnote is a heavy 20kg beast, like a huge integrated amplifier.
the unit comes with interchangeable feets, I have chosen the classic spike version.
the manufacturers philosophy ( can be found on the manufacturer url) behind the E-2 is a long and interesting read and gave me some inspiration to understand audio component design better.
Connecting the E-2 showed me, that one of the phono inputs is for DS-Audio carts only, which means, than I can use currently only 3 of the inputs.
it looks like, that I have to install a DS Audio cart sooner or later to connect all 4 turntables.
my first listening impressions are very positive and do meet my expectations from the fair performance I had in my mind.
The tone is more to the warmer and solid side, than to thin and analytical, the E-2 sounds in a very positive way like a very good tube Phonostage.
As the E-2 shall like low impedance carts, I do have a 1,5ohm TechDAS (my sonic lab OEM) cart connected, as well as an old low output Ortofon SL15 MKII.
Both carts do work very fine with the E-2.
The last cart connected is the Ortofon Anna, which shows, that the E-2 can handle more analytic carts as well. the Anna still plays like an Ortofon cart with all the character you would expect.
now I will wait for some more hours of music listening to understand the Soulnote E-2 even better.
