FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

  • What does your preamp offer over other, more established builders?

    • When designing the Crossfire range of preamps the team approached the preamp with the aim of building a zero compromise, high quality and robust system which meets and exceeds the demands of any soundman/ soundwoman.

    • No expense is spared, utilising the highest quality of components and digital chips in order to provide flawless sonics with an accurate and controlled feel.

    • Developed from the ground up, taking a fresh approach whereby all features of the preamp, apart from input gain, is controlled digitally in order to maintain spec and accuracy for years to come, with greatly reduced fear of components losing tolerance or going bad over time such as the plethora of capacitors used in filter and crossover stages.

  • Your preamps are all digital and modern but I play old records. Are your preamps really suitable for someone who plays older subgenres of reggae such as roots and rockers?

    • The team at Abzu Electronics enjoy a wide range of subgenres of reggae and have designed the preamps not only to excel with modern, digitally produced music, but also strive to deliver a first class sound and experience when playing vinyl.

    • A top tier phono preamplifier ensures that every bit of detail and depth are accurately reproduced. The use of high quality componentry ensures rich and clear reproduction.

  • What’s the 6-Way all about and can I run mine 5 way or 4 way etc?

    • The Crossfire range of preamps can all output into up to six individual stereo (or mono if you chose) bandpass outputs. This accommodates setups with subs, kicks, mids, coaxial compression drivers (compression drivers with two individual drivers inside) and bullets, giving you all the flexibility needed to finetune your sound to how you want it.

    • If you want to run 5 way, 4 way, or even lower, you can easily adjust the settings on the screen on the rear of the unit.

  • What is the advantage of a fully DSP preamp and why should I care?

    • Digital can often be associated with a harsh and clinical sound. This is why we’ve dedicated countless hours designing and implementing a robust, high end and rich sounding analogue input and output stage. This, alongside the capabilities of DSP means you can have the best of both worlds, with features such as limiters, adjustable crossovers, delay for time alignment etc at your fingertips, forging the need to incorporate loudspeaker management systems into your setup or just sticking with whatever crossover frequencies you spec’ed, with no ability to change when you decide to change boxes or want to simply experiment with different options.

  • What does the bass growl do?

    • The bass growl provides two unique flavours of character to your sub output. Ideal for adding some more flavour to your subs. Each growl setting can be blended into the clean sub signal and can also be driven harder or less hard in order to provide a tactile and widely versatile tool for adding some extra spice to your scoops or subs.

      • “Hard” setting:

        • This option closely mimics the sound of valve amplifiers when being pushed hard, causing lots of harmonics to develop above the fundamental frequency of the bass. In short this is the valve distortion setting

      • “Soft” setting:

        • The Soft growl setting is similar to the Hard setting, however sounds much closer to classic analogue amps being pushed hard, which we all know and love! This can be used to introduced some more toned down harmonics which can add additional life and soul to your subs. Especially nice on scoops!

  • Do you do custom units?

    • Yes and no.

      • We do offer custom choice of colour (front panel, and/ or engraving colour), as well as the option to engrave a custom logo on the front panel of your preamp

      • We can offer some changes to the functionality of certain knobs, switches, inputs and outputs, however these will need to be discussed with the team prior to your order and an additional cost will be incurred.

      • Due to being new to the scene we need more time to establish stock and manufacturing practices before we can offer fully custom preamps, however we look forward to opening the order book for fully custom units in the future on of vinyl.

  • Why are your build times so long?

    • Due to being new to the world of building preamps we are yet to build up stock of surplus components, PCBs and chassis, meaning build times are longer than we would ideally like. Once we properly get our feet off the ground and are able to, we will stock more parts, which will significantly decrease build times.