This is the best tubed pre-amp near this price range on the market!!It just gets better and better, smooth from top to bottom.

After break-in of 70hrs. The Anthem still sound pretty good, very nice detail and soundstage. Tones are mostly correct though I suspect I still my have more breaking in to do. Even though the sound is crystal clear it is irratating after only a few songs, the highs are smoothed out now and the mids are right the mid-bass is very full but the very low octaves lack weight. The overall sound is not tube like at all but more like a very very good solid state pre. This pre-amp is very AV friendly no problem to intergrate into an AV system at all you can even hook up two amps, one for music one for HT. But this bass is what concerns me or lack of and the extra crispness of the highs not too high in octave but really crisp.
rest of system
Adcom CD
Hafler Amp (soon to be up-graded)
Dynaudio speakers
all wire is Kimber HERO and 8PR

Nice sound and flexibility. Good build quality.

See below

I bought an Anthem Pre2L on the used market which was in mint condition. I wanted to try a tubed preamp in my system, and the Anthem had 2 important features that I needed - remote control and a headphone jack.

The overall build quality of the unit is good. Nice strong steel chassis, 1/4" thick aluminum faceplate, gold plated connectors, etc. The unit is a bit large compared to other preamps, and will not win any beauty contests.

After I installed the Pre2L into my system, the first thing I noticed is that I was getting a very slight transformer hum through my speakers. It was not audible while playing music, but still it was there.

The sound of the unit was great. As mentioned by another reviewer below, it does not have a warm and fuzzy tube-like sound at all. I found the unit to be accurate and dynamic throughout the frequency range. Sound-wise, I could not fault the unit.

It did however have a few small issues that I just couldn't live with.

For one, the volume control spun too fast for me with the remote, making the volume difficult to adjust at low listening levels. Setting the adjustable gain control to 6db helped somewhat, but not enough to rectify the problem.

Secondly there was also some mechanical backlash in the volume control while adjusting by hand. Normally this would be no big deal either, except the volume was raised and lowered throughout these couple degrees. This made setting precise volume adjustments difficult even by hand, let alone through the remote. I e-mailed SF about this issue and received a prompt reply stating that this backlash was normal, and needed to be there for the clutch mechanism between the motor and the volume pot to operate properly......sigh.

At the full retail price of $1,300, I think this unit is a bit overpriced. At this price point, one would be better off locating a used SF Line-1 and going with that.

On the used market though, the Pre2L is a good buy in the $650-$800 range. If the issues with the volume control don't bother you, the Pre2L is a winner.

Similar Products Used:

Yamaha C-80, Rotel RC-995