Ray Samuels Audio Emmeline XR-10B Preamp, Shelter 90X and Micromagic Magic Diamond Cartridges

An excellent and versatile phono preamp and two great—and very different—cartridges.

Emmeline XR-10B

If you have a conversation with Ray Samuels, you’ll discover that he’s an enthusiastic guy with a lingering affection for the military planes he used to build electronics for. This explains his habit of naming his audio designs after fighting machines. His lineup includes the Stealth (a preamp/headphone amp), and the Raptor and the SR-71 (both headphone amps). But Samuels has a soft side, too, reflected by the rather sweet name that precedes the masculine nomenclature—Emmeline. Emmeline, you see, is Samuels’ daughter. It’s probably my imagination, but I wonder if this could explain why Samuels’ audio gear is so diminutive as to be practically doll-sized.

Diminutive Samuels’ products may be; toys they most certainly are not. To see what I mean, take a look inside the XR-10B, a $5000 solid-state phono preamp with outboard power supply. Not only does Samuels hand-assemble each dual-mono unit—only the power cord and umbilical between the two chassis are shared—but he does so using FR4 (a military-spec circuit board material), .1% tolerance Vishay resistors, and tantalum and polypropylene caps, which he meticulously places at 90-degree angles to each other in order to minimize noise. The power supply is just as carefully assembled, and houses two small toroidal transformers—one for each channel.

Like the Manley Steelhead, which also sports a separate power supply, the XR-10B is a most versatile phono pre-amp. You can hook up three different arm leads at a time—there are several ’tables out there that will accept up to three arms—or, if you’re truly whackedout about analog, three entirely different ’table/arm/cartridge combinations. Simply select the one you want to listen to using the center knob, and choose (and do experiment with) the appropriate load, capacitance, and gain for each channel from the flanking trios of smaller knobs (the capacitance switches affect only moving-magnet designs). In addition, the XR-10B sports both singleended and balanced outputs (hence the unit’s “B” designation), which are active simultaneously and at the same output level, allowing you to drive the different inputs of one or even two linestages.

For moving-coil users, the load and gain switches are this design’s most useful and luxurious functions. I mean, would you rather futz around with those impossibly tiny DIP-switches and loading pins to change these parameters, or simply turn two little rotary knobs? Via the latter, the Samuels’ unit lets you choose impedances of 30, 50, 80, 100, 1K, and 47K ohms. Since most cartridges have a recommended range of impedances, you can easily listen to a few different choices and go with the one that sounds best to you (lowering the load generally darkens the sound, while raising it opens things up), which was incredibly handy while evaluating the two cartridges discussed below.

The thing you’ll notice when first easing the stylus into the grooves is that music emerges from the XR-10B against an unusually silent background. This is one of the quietest, least grainy phono preamps I’ve heard. (The only model I know of that’s even quieter is Sutherland’s battery-powered Ph.D.) Another notable characteristic of the XR-10B is something I’ll describe as a kind of uncluttered neutrality. This device is very clean and clear. It lacks the immediately recognizable sonic signature we usually hear when we place a new component in our systems, although there’s lots of space (if not cushions of air) between instruments. This is not to say that the XR-10B’s entirely “neutral” or free of coloration— nothing is—but that its “sound” takes that much longer to identify.

Tonally, the Emmeline is very consistent from bottom to top. Its overall character is one I would describe as a touch dark, somewhere just off center. This is tricky to gauge because I’m not talking about the kind of pervasive midnight- black that solid-state once had in such abundance (and that we’re witnessing the gradual disappearance of), but something rather more akin to a delicate ink wash that removes a bit of the bloom from Sonny Rollins’ saxophone, or some of the old-gold glow from Nathan Milstein’s Strad during a Bach Partita [DG], or a few of the shimmering overtones from Glenn Kotche’s cymbal work during “Hell is Chrome” on Wilco’s a ghost is born [Nonesuch/Rhino]. This slight darkness also comes with a touch of dryness that, on the one hand, give Milstein’s bow a keen sense of precision, attack, and dynamic excitement as it pushes and pulls against the violin strings, but, on the other, snatches away a degree of sweetness, breath, and poetry.