Mark LevinsonNo 38susedMark Levinson No 38sThis is the 38S which is a significant upgrade towards the 38. Cosmetic condition is good (see pictures) but sound is fantastic. Built like a tank - Remote also built like a tank. With original man...1400.00

Mark Levinson No 38s

Listing ID: lis99g77 Classified 
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Condition
7/10
Payment methods
Ships fromWoodinville, WA, 98077
Ships toUnited States
Package dimensions16.0" × 5.0" × 16.0" (40.0 lbs.)
Shipping carrierFedEx
Shipping cost$77.40
Original accessoriesRemote Control, Manual
AverageResearch Pricing

This is the 38S which is a significant upgrade towards the 38. Cosmetic condition is good (see pictures) but sound is fantastic. Built like a tank - Remote also built like a tank. With original manual. Will double box.

The No.38S features more than three dozen refinements, all of which reportedly improve its sonic performance. The big change is the use of a four-layer printed circuit board in place of the '38's two-layer board. While the board's dielectric is not the superb-sounding Teflon used in the Levinson No.26S—you can't get multilayer Teflon pcbs—it is made from an unidentified material developed for VHF communications use, and is said to share some of Teflon's electrical characteristics. The inner two pcb layers are "power planes," while the top layer appears to be a ground plane, giving the voltage rails and ground reference very low source impedances—as if, Madrigal says, "there was a very fast bypass capacitor on each IC supply pin."

As a result of extended listening tests to passive components, Madrigal's engineers focused on a small number of critical components in the '38 circuit that would benefit from being replaced by premium parts (footnote 2). Fourteen resistors in each channel were replaced by close-tolerance bulk metal-foil types, and one capacitor per channel was replaced by a Teflon-dielectric type.

Interestingly, the actual gain elements in the '38S are Burr-Brown OPA2604 op-amp ICs, two per channel, combined with a current-mode stage to form a semi-discrete instrumentation amplifier. The OPA2604 is a premium chip, widely respected in the world of analog audio design.

Technology
For a detailed functional description, I refer readers to Bob Harley's August 1994 review of the No.38. But basically, the circuits for the two channels are separated by the power-supply and control circuitry, these screened by an internal can. This, together with the use of opto-isolators to connect control information to the volume-control and selector relays, results in a very low noise-floor. The input-selection relays are adjacent to the input jacks, minimizing the length of pcb trace the signal has to encounter, while the volume control uses a two-channel MDAC chip, one per channel. 

Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/solidpreamps/mark_levinson_no38s_preamplifier/index.html#TrWQ5migHPv3RGzp.99

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