I have a pair of MonAmour amps, and an Eros 2 phono stage. For reasons irrelevant, they were, up to today, not in the same place (actually, not even in the same country). So, before anything happens, I'm obviously going to adapt the voltage of the transformers of the MonAmours and check that the circuits are OK after travel and redo the output transformer wiring (I seem to have managed to put my hands on a nice pair of Klipsch RF-35, which are 8 ohms, and they are currently set on 4) before doing anything.
The current/upcoming working setups are:
- a Thorens 145 hooked to the Eros 2, which is then hooked to an integrated, low-end, preamp/amp and then some pretty generic speakers
- a Raspberry Pi acting as a roon bridge outputing via a Khadas Tone Board to the MonAmours and, as mentioned, probably a pair of Klipsch RF-35, which I should get next week (I won't have time to tweak the MonAmours before next Monday anyhow). Volume control is made at the software level.
As you can see, the one thing missing here for a perfect setup is a preamp. In the not so far future, there will be a BePre2. It is nearly fully budgeted, and is the Christmas project if the Gods of the supply chain are with us. So it's not really worth it to get a generic preamp in the meantime.
Hence the question, which probably shows my lack of understanding of the functioning of the preamp, apart from the fact that it has a volume pot: what would happen if I plugged in the Eros 2 directly in the MonAmours? Would I get the equivalent of a full volume, i.e. maybe damaging the speakers, probably bringing some wear to the windows and deafening the whole household, or would I be at mid-range, or would the signal actually not be audible? Given the fact that my guts tell me that the answer is my first hypothesis, I'm not going to risk it out of the blue, but I'm actually curious.
