Pre Amplificateur analogique
 
The new Artera Pre from QUAD, Britain’s original high-end audio company, draws upon the company’s rich technical heritage whilst being a design firmly of the present. The first dedicated analogue preamplifier to join QUAD’s Artera Series, the company’s flagship range of solid-state audio electronics, the Artera Pre reintroduces a famous QUAD feature – the Tilt control.
 
The new Artera Pre from QUAD is the first dedicated analogue preamplifier to join QUAD’s Artera Series, the company’s flagship range of solid-state audio electronics, the Artera Pre also reintroduces QUADs Tilt control feature.
 
Overview First available in 1982 on the classic QUAD 34 preamplifier, the Tilt control was created by QUAD founder Peter Walker as an audiophile-quality answer to tone adjustment. He believed that in the real world, the ability to adjust tonal balance on an amplifier was useful to cater for different rooms and recordings, but that typical tone and EQ controls were clumsy and inadequate in their effect.
While conventional tone controls adjust bass or treble individually, the Tilt control adjusts both ends of the frequency spectrum together – either attenuating the bass and lifting the treble, or lifting the bass and attenuating the treble, in steps of 1dB. In effect, it rotates – or tilts – the audible frequency range on a 700Hz axis, adjusting the overall balance of the sound to make it ‘warmer’ or ‘cooler’ without affecting the apparent volume or ‘colouring’ the sound.
The Tilt control is unique to QUAD and is a subtle, precise and consistent way to adjust sound to compensate for different recordings and the acoustic anomalies of different rooms. Though much acclaimed when it was introduced and still admired to this day, it hasn’t featured on a new QUAD product for a decade – the Artera Pre is the perfect opportunity for its return.
The new Artera preamp adds further analogue bass filters to the Tilt function for additional sound tailoring, which may be useful for a variety of reasons. For example, optional bass lift (of +4.5dB around 60Hz) may be used to give smaller speakers a little more extension, while bass cut (-4.5dB shelf response) can help to deal with unwanted room resonances. These filters are engineered for precise and refined adjustment, and their effect is much more sophisticated than typical bass controls.
The Tilt and bass filters can be combined to create individual EQ profiles to assign to each source input. In this way, each input can be configured to suit the connected component, be it a turntable, a CD player, a tuner, a DAC or streamer, or any other playback device with an analogue output. Individual adjustment may also be made in real time, to suit whichever recording is being played.