A very serious - and very wealthy - audiophile in Malaysia had played with more than 20 different phono preamplifiers before he bought the DIVA. After he bought, his regular hifi dealer tried to interest him in six other phono preamps, all costing considerably more money.He auditioned all of them, but stuck with the DIVA.

Needless to say, the dealer was not very pleased. But the audiophile is - now with an all-DIVA system comprising:

• Virtuoso III phono preamp
• M-7 preamp
• Tian Zhu EL34 stereo power amp
• Toccata & Fugue interconnects
• Mongoose power cords

Incidentally, his loudspeakers are the Second ReTHMs, which DIVA jointly exhibited with at CES / THE SHOW between 2000 and 2003.

---

DIVA phono preamplifiers feature a proprietory RIAA equalisation circuitry developed by T S Lim.

It's our trade secret. All we can say is that it is based on a very simple idea. And that it works extremely well, achieving near-perfect linearity across the entire audio spectrum.

The rest of the phono preamplifier continues the DIVA tradition of offering exceptional sound quality - the result of T S Lim's ingenious design, careful selection and matching of components and high quality craftsmanship with point-to-point hard wiring.

All DIVA phono preamplifiers come with a separate, solid-state rectifier power supply, using an excellent-sounding, European made rectifier. Our experiments with tube rectifiers suggest that they do not work as well in this circuitry.

Gain on the phono stage is high enough for moving magnet (MM) and high-output moving coil (MC) cartridges of down to 1.2 mV. (With a good-sounding phono preamplifier like the DIVA, it may not be necessary to buy costly, low-output MC cartridges. We have customers who achieve very good sound with relatively cheap MM cartridges.)

For lower-output cartridges, we provide a step-up transformer, custom-wound to T S Lim's specifications by a leading European transformer maker. This comes in a separate box, with Van den Hul connecting cables. We do not install an MM-MC switch as it badly affects sound quality.

Virtuoso - US$1280
T S Lim's original design, a two-tube phono preamplifier offering exceptional sound quality.

Virtuoso III - US$2280
A three-tube design - the best from T S Lim and possibly the best that money can buy!

Virtuoso Step-up - US$980
To use with low-output MC cartridges.