Connoisseur

The LYRA CONNOISSEUR brand signals extraordinary performance beyond what is normally possible to achieve. The "raison d'etre" for LYRA CONNOISSEUR audio electronics is to move beyond boarders and limitations and to provide a window to live musical events at a level not normally achieved with reproduced audio.

"In the recent issue of Hi-Fi + (issue 43) they have an 8 page review of the lyra 4.2 se with a LOT of content about the design and construction side. They claim it is the best componant that has ever come along.

Magazines always give lavish praise in reviews so we tend to take it with a grain of salt, but trust me, you have never seen anything like this Hifi Plus review. They talk of the Lyra like the second coming of god, with the reviewer mortaging his life to get one and the publisher about to as well. They talk of it being a pre amp that is on a level so far above all other products seen yet. And considering the exotic/expensive gear reviewed in Hi-Fi + this is saying something."

History

Lyra-Connoisseur was founded in 1987 in California, and is a young brand, free of the burdens of legacy technology. From its inception, it has been able to focus on the application of advanced concepts and technology to music reproduction.

With our debut product, the 1.0 phono preamplifier, we introduced one of our core technologies - "3-dimensional air-dielectric construction", a labor-intensive technology designed to eliminate the problems caused by conventional 2-dimensional circuit boards. By building our circuits 3-dimensionally in the air rather than relying only on a 2-dimensional circuit board, we were able to increase component density and greatly shrink the overall size of the circuits, as well as reduce parasitic induction, stray capacitance and leakage currents. At the same time, as most circuit nodes are insulated by air (the best dielectric of all) rather than conventional printed circuit board materials such as Glass-Epoxy or Teflon, dielectric distortions are practically non-existant. With this innovation, the circuit bandwidth and stability could be raised substantially, with marked improvements to the measured and sonic performance.

With the 2.0 phono preamplifier of 1992, we upgraded the parts quality to the finest commercially available, converted the entire design into full dual-monaural construction - including separate L/R power transformers, designed new voltage regulators, and improved the performance and stability of the amplifier circuits. As with the 1.0, the 2.0 was available with stepped attenators and was designed to drive power amplifiers directly, enabling music-lovers to hear their LP collection at its best.

With the Lyra-Connoisseur 3.0 full-function preamp (development began in 1994), however, we wanted to accomplish considerably more. Rather than be satisfied with what was commonly accepted or available, we
wanted to push the limits of what was possible. We therefore rethought every aspect of how a preamp should be engineered, and developed our own technical solutions and custom parts where traditional concepts or existing commercial components didn't measure up to our requirements.

Separate power supply chassies for each channel, amorphous-core transformers, high-voltage film capacitor power supplies, and current-mode series/shunt hybrid voltage regulators were combined with high-speed amplifier topologies, custom capacitors, resistors, active devices and exotic ceramic-based circuit-board materials were just some of the technologies that we developed for the Lyra-Connoisseur 3.0. Unlike the 1.0 and 2.0, the 3.0 was designed to serve as a line preamp as well as a phono preamp, bringing the benefits of our technologies to CD reproduction as well as phono.

But while the 3.0 was very favorably received, it was extremely large, heavy, hot and expensive.