Lazarus cascade basic preamplifier

Squidward and I got together today to do some swapping and I ended up with this unit.
He had just recently acquired the piece but didn't need the unit and wanted an el84 based
mono amp I had plus we traded some other stuff. Anyway he had allready informed me of
some xtalk issues when other inputs are plugged in and making music that he had noticed.

Well hooked up the preamp and after some fiddling and use the tape in's instead of the others
the xtalk is much less and it sounds real good.

At first there was a noisy/crackly sound when no music was going so I tapped on the tubes
and 1 made a pretty good noise, so I shut it down and swapped one tube to another socket
and reseated them all and all the noises went away, GOOD TO GO!

First listening it was quite mid rangy and a little haisey but now after playing for about 2 hours
it is quite full sounding with very good detail and quite musical, overall pretty darn nice!

It's a contender! Runs (4) 12ax7's and came with some relatively new looking haltrons.
(you'll notice the seperate power supply just to the left)

Here's a pic, anyone heard one of these before? Or any other comments are welcome.

Lazarus,,,,super excellent stuff!!!

Lazarus made some great sounding stuff, however, if I

remember correctly there was something fishy/shady with their company toward the end. I seem to recall problems - maybe leading to some people losing money???? I think Stereophile did some kind of write up on it many years ago.

Does anyone know the story?

I don't know anything about them or this unit really.

It's got a lot of gain, I just switched out the 12ax7's for some 6829's which give it a
little more character and being only a 40mu tube it still has a lot of gain. I was told it
also has a good sounding phono section, well see.

It has levels for each channel then a main volume control but the level pots are kinda
interesting in that it looks like you can take them out of the curcuit by turning them
down all the way to where they click then there on full.

I had one of those a few years ago. It was basically a good sounding preamp - and the phono section was quite nice. Mine ended up getting pretty noisey after a while. I swapped out most of the power supply components, and that quited it down some. There was still quite a noticeable amount of hiss (through Klipschorns), and I figured that I needed to replace a lot of resistors. The noise it was making sounded like carbon resistor noise to me. I ended up selling it before I did the final upgrades. I think a lot of the components in the version that I had were running pretty close to the rated power of the component, so I wasn't surprised that things were starting to wear out.

Mark

This one seems pretty quiet, someone has added a whole bunch of caps and the
resistors do look like they may have had some work to.

I'll keep an eye on the noise, this is just something to play with but glad you found
it sounded pretty good and I have no pre with a phono stage so I thought it could
be handy. I use the EAR for my main rig hooked to the Anthem preamp.