🔊 Bellari PA550 Preamp Review

Pros: Good build quality, very clear, clean sound with great volume boost, bass and treble controls. The phono stage is surprisingly good, absolutely noise-free and with good expansion, giving it a somewhat warm feel. Cons: no switch, no remote control, only red color available.

Sources don't sound isolated at volume levels, you can barely hear them when there's nothing playing on the stage you're on. fits into the 5-pin connector that forms the input of the preamp's phono stage, so stick a spatula stick in the hole to get some contact. Edit: With the preamp running at full power into the right channel, in both phono and aux modes. I replaced it with my original passive preamp and original separate phono stage.

This little red preamp is very good for those looking for pure sound at a great price. I hooked it up to my Emotiva A 300 power amp and my Fluance 85 turntable on a dirty To Audio output. Well, the sound is clear and pleasant. The tone controls work together to bring bass and treble to life on a variety of LPs. It was a dismal Best Buy. Now for the bad news: there's no on/off switch, so you'll have to turn it off. Even more disturbing is the loud bang I hear through my filthy Zu-Audio…

The Bellari PA550 preamp is well built and sounds great, but there are a few things to note. First, there's no power switch, so you'll need to plug it into a switched outlet or it'll just stay on all the time. The second and more annoying point is that the audio inputs are not isolated from each other, so there is a lot of leakage from inputs 1 and 2 to the phono input. I like the bass and treble controls and the headphone output. Connecting this preamp to a pair of Dynaco Mark Three 60 watt…

I've been playing with a Sony PS-X6 turntable to listen to vinyl after washing it. When I switched to the Grado Black3 pickup, I got very boomy bass on some recordings with my Schitt Mani preamp. This involved trying different gain settings by flipping small switches on the bottom of the unit, and the results were far from satisfactory. The tone controls were the reason I tried this product and a very small adjustment seems to solve the problem. I'd like a switch, but I'd like the added…

Bellari makes several AV gadgets that span the modern world of personal MP3 players and the old habit of using full stereos. This turned out to be exactly what I needed. It integrates perfectly with your turntable, tuner, power amplifier and speakers, as well as your iPod shuffle. (The original preamp has gone elsewhere, and stereo receivers aren't as easy to find on the second-hand market as they used to be.) Inputs are disabled. Of course, hi-fi preamps also suffer a bit from this. The left…

This is a simple phono preamp that offers instant sound improvement. This unit is very solidly built with smooth volume and tone controls. The tone controls are locked at 0 in the middle. I plugged my FiiO X1 into the front input and the sound through the headphones became more balanced, wide open, three dimensional. Adjusting the tone controls improved the sound significantly and allowed me to tune the music to my liking. I noticed very little headphone noise when switching between input 1…

The PA550 seemed like a good buy. Compact. Inexpensive. Headphone amplifier with phono stage. What more can you ask for? Actually quite a lot. The build is pretty solid, but the headphone jack itself doesn't live up to specs. The 3.5mm plug is loose in the port, resulting in crackling and audio dropouts during playback. In terms of performance, there is a sharpness that is quite annoying. Especially when the volume is turned up. The cymbals and tambourines shatter like glass, and the mid-range…

After a bit of a rocky start which the guys at bellari easily solved I have used this unit as a phono stage on my U Turn Orbit turntable with very nice results. My turntable had a built in preamp which worked fine but was a bit quiet for my system. After looking at several options, this one seemed to have everything I was looking for at a reasonable price. It had a volume control and looked good. The first thing that struck me was the build quality. It is very durable and very beautiful in my…