VAS Citation One Preamp & Citation Two Power Amplifier

It will be more than a passing irony if the LP outlives the CD. Yet, if sonic merit is the issue, the LP should be the survivor. Both mediums have their plusses, but I still turn to my LP collection for most of my serious listening—and to SACD for much of the rest. SACD and DVD-A may not have captured the market, but they clearly show that CD is an outdated technology with sonic limits that the very best players— such as the Meitner—can ameliorate but not overcome.

The future of technology also favors the survival of the LP over the CD. Digital servers and downloads are only part of the story. My first experiments with Dolby TrueHD (I have not heard DTS-HD, the DTS equivalent) also indicate that even a home receiver like the new Onkyo TX-NR905 can produce musical sound with HD DVD and Blu-ray discs that has better upper-octave definition and deep bass than all but the best (and most expensive) CD players. If Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD make the major breakthrough into music they seem destined to make in video, CD is likely to deservedly go the way of the 78-rpm record. And, if downloadable lossless digital becomes widely available, the day may well come when records are the only discs left.

As many audiophiles are discovering, LP is also more fun to collect. I have yet to read articles about anyone collecting older or esoteric CDs, in part because many older CDs reveal all of the faults in digital and few of the merits. Collecting mono and stereo LPs (and even 78s), as well as high-quality new LPs, is a different story. You can find Web site after Web site devoted to how to collect and reproduce them. Exploring the history of recording and exploring the history of musical performance are both rewarding and fun.

This brings me to the VAS Citation One preamp and Citation Two amplifier. For those of you who are not familiar with the Citation name—and it has been quite a while—the Citation line originated as Harman-Kardon’s “high-end” products back in the tube era. The Citation One and Citation Two were designed by Stewart Hegeman, one of the greatest designers of tube equipment of any era. They were highly innovative components at the time, and provided a sound quality that had only one rival—Dynaco—at anything like their price. The original Citation One and Citation Two were sharply cost-constrained in parts-quality however, and designed and sold before designers fully discovered just how different given capacitors and resistors could sound.

The VAS Citation One: The Last True Analog Preamp?

The Citation One preamp was a particularly outstanding fullfeatured preamp back in the days before it became fashionable to omit the phonostage and virtually every other preamp control feature. It had adjustable turnover and roll-off for virtually every LP ever made. It had separate tone controls for each channel, a blend control, a moderately useful loudness control, and low-frequency filters for rumble. Unlike far too many preamps today, it also had a balance control. Preamps did a lot before they became reduced to linestages, in a process of high-end evolution that seems to charge more and more for less and less.

Unlike many of its competitors at the time, the Citation One was not forgiving or warm, but it did have a truly exceptional midrange with excellent upper-bass-to-lower-midrange timbre and detail. It also had very good life and air in the upper midrange without a touch of hardness. In fact, the design proved to be so good that—like the Marantz 7C and other great tube preamps of the day—some audiophiles still use it in its original version, although listenable survivors survivors must have their power-supply filter capacitors replaced, and resistors and caps in the signal path should be updated. The same, incidentally, is true of the Citation Two amplifier and virtually all older tube equipment.

The VAS version of the Citation One is very similar to the original unit, but makes some important improvements in components and features, adding a much bigger power supply with a transformer four times larger than the original transformer. It also uses polypropylene capacitors, audiophilegrade resistors, ceramic sockets, and Teflon wire. Given the fact that the original design dates back to the 1950s, there is good reason for most of these updates and they make the new version of the Citation One into a real high-end product.

Another area where the VAS Citation One is a major advance over the original is that it not only comes with the original moving-magnet phono circuit but also with a stepup transformer for moving-coil cartridges. This moving-coil transformer proved to be of exceptionally high sonic quality. No device is perfectly neutral, but in comparing the sound of the same model of high- and low-output Dynavector cartridges, I heard virtually the same sound quality through the moving-magnet and moving-coil inputs. The transformer was transparent enough so that the sonic differences were largely the result of the slight differences in sound of the two cartridges rather than colorations introduced by the transformer. (High- and low-output cartridges of the same model never sound exactly alike.) The transformer’s loading and gain are also well chosen—100 ohms for its higher-output moving-coil input with 12dB gain, and 47 ohms for its loweroutput moving-coil input with 18dB gain. The loading of the VAS Citation One’s own moving-magnet circuit is 47k ohms and 250pf. This range of inputs allows the Citation One to handle cartridges with outputs from 0.1mV to 5mV.