PJ and I had planned to revise the Seduction kit as much as five years ago. But the kit sold so well that we didn't want to throw everyone a curve by making some small changes that were more about easing production than radically changing the sound of the preamp. So it stayed in the lineup from 2001 until just last month. The unfortunate side effect was that the assembly manual became more and more out of date as the visual appearance of various parts were forced to change over the 12 year run. This made building the kit a little more difficult than necessary.
And even so the recent retirement of the Seduction kit create a small tempest. To those unhappy with the demise of Seduction, rest assured that we have a replacement in the works. The new Reduction phono preamp kit will be the same 6922 based circuit that was in Seduction. The biggest cosmetic changes to the basic kit will be that the power transformer will be the PT-5 that we use in the Eros kit, and the chassis plate will be 8 x 10". The use of the PT-5 is a very cool change, partly because it is more quiet EM-wise than the old PT-1, which lowers the noise floor of the preamp a bit, and partly because it allows the use of a regulator on the DC heater supply.
We don't have pricing finalized, but the price for the basic Reduction kit will be as close as we can get to the old Seduction price. The price for the upgrade kit that replaces the Seduction C4S will be a bit more than the old upgrade, but for a couple of very good reasons. Firstly the PC boards used will be the much more reliable and easy to work with boards that we use in the most recent kits like Paramount and BeePre. A secondly - this is really cool - the upgrade will include not only C4S active loads for the gain stages, but since the power transformer has enough current capability for it, it will also include also a zener based high voltage shunt regulator circuit, thus taking the sonics up a notch from Seduction.
And so Reduction should work out to be a very good way to add vinyl to a system based upon Crack, S.E.X. and Stereomour. And it will also work nicely with the Quickie. Gain will remain the same as Seduction at around 36dB in the basic version and 40dB with the C4S upgrade. And thus cartridges with an output level below about 2mV will typically need some form of step up device between the cartridge and the Reduction. High output moving coil cartridges and moving magnet cartridges will work great with the preamp as-is.
We are pretty close to on schedule with the release of this kit and I hope to be able to start taking orders some time this month.
