Kondo Pre Amps

Kondo Preamps

The M7 and M10 Preamps

The Kondo designed M7 preamps, represent the embodiment of the Audio Note's design philosophy. There are less than 20 components in the entire M7 Line preamp! The majority of the parts are Kondo designed and many, like the wire and coupling capacitors are hand made in Kondo's factory. The all silver versions use Kondo's hand made silver-foil capacitors and braided silver ground wire. The line stage uses a 6X4 rectifier tube and a 6072A for the gain stage. The output impedance of the M7 preamps is relatively high at approximately 8K Ohms. These preamps should not be used to drive long runs (more than 3 meters) of interconnect and should be used only with amplifiers having a 100K Ohms input impedance.

There are five M7 preamplifiers.

M7-Tube: MM phono + 5 line inputs, tape loop, 2 main outputs
M7-Tube/Silver: as above, but with hand made silver foil capacitors
M7-Line: 6 line inputs, tape loop, 2 main outputs
M7-Line/Silver: as above, but with hand made silver foil capacitors
M7-Phono: RIAA only stage for the Ongaku amplifier, with hand made silver foil capacitors

M10 Preamp

The new M10 preamp supplants the M7 Tube Silver as the world's finest preamp.

Over 30 years of designing low level microphone transformers and amplifiers, combined with at least 20 years of careful research into all aspects of the requirements of phono cartridges and line sources, led Mr. Kondo to choose several features new to preamplifier circuitry. The M10 features the usual Audio Note refinements such as:

Handmade Audio Note Silver foil signal capacitors
All silver wiring even in the power supply and grounding circuits
Valve rectification with choke filters
Black Gate and Cerafine capacitors throughout the power supply
6072A double triodes in single ended configuration
no signal or DC feedback whatsoever

With the M10, Mr. Kondo has gone much further:

Silver wired LC type RIAA equalizer, instead of the usual passive network with capacitors and resistors, this is the first time in audio history that a choke RIAA correction network has been used
The Kondo designed silver wired inductors for the RIAA EQ are hand made in house at Audio Note's Tokyo factory
Dual mono construction
Hand made, silver wired output transformer with silvered former and balanced 600 Ohm configuration
Silver foil coupling and electrolytic capacitors - handmade by Audio Note
Extremely oversized separate power supply with large 5AR4 rectifier tubes
99.99% pure Audio Note Silver wired line cord

It is unlikely that anyone (except Audio Note) will go beyond this preamp.

The sonic quality of the M10 has to be experienced to be believed, this pre-amplifier and the GAKU-ON mono power amplifiers are the embodiment of Audio Note's complete design philosophy and as such represent the absolute pinnacle of what is possible in music reproduction today, at a price, of course!!