What led me to develop the New Jade was a confusion people had, that came about because I had too many preamp models at the time, namely the Coral, Jade, Pearl and the Opal reference.
I set about to do two things: amalgamate the Jade and Pearl to bring the models down to three price ranges, low, moderate and high and to reduce the price of the middle preamp to below the $5000 level.
The original Jade analog and power supply circuit boards were replaced with the ones from the Pearl. Logically the Pearl name would have been retained save for the fact that we had a large quantity of Jade name tags in stock. These are gold plated machined brass with engraved serial numbers and thus would have been costly to throw out and order new Pearl tags.
The original switching of the inputs in the Jade was accomplished by routing all input sources via co-ax cable to the front switch and on to the balance control.
This was replaced with high quality hermetically sealed relays mounted on a new circuit board in the rear soldered directly on to the input RCA connectors.
This has shortened the signal path as well as significantly improved life expectancy of the signal switching contacts.
Together these changes reduced labor cost, thus allowing us to reach our price target, while at the same time elevating the price / performance of the Jade to a new heightened level.
The new Jade also incorporates higher quality parts, such as Vishay & Dale resistors together with an upgraded power supply that uses two 15 Henry choke filters to reduce noise & hum below what our test instruments can measure. It is now common knowledge that the power supply is as critical as the analog circuit performance.
