[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by Rafale

For my part I liked the CT5

As did Jeff Whitlock when he heard mine. OTOH, my friend Gregory really prefers the Premier 17.

There are qualities that I like about both.

The CT-5 is more neutral, detailed, transparent, faster, and quieter, but the Premier 17 is more musical, warmer, weightier, and fuller sounding, and has more fully fleshed out images. I'd love to have a pre that combined the qualities of both, but that's probably a GAT.

At the end of the day, I probably prefer the Premier 17 as I find it more musically engaging than the CT-5 and it pulls me into the music more.

The midrange of the Premier 17 is to die for.

Here are some quotes from the Stereophile review (Stereophile, May 8, 2001)

"This is not to say that the 17LS wasn't luscious and sweet. It most certainly was, but in the captivating ways that a live instrument is or a wonderful acoustic space can be, with rich, dense tones and exquisitely, intricately layered harmonic structures."

and

"I just knew that it would have a glorious midrange, and boy oh boy, did it ever. Sweet, luscious, clean, defined, detailed, coherent, clear—my notes are full of page after page of audiophile superlatives, hoping, I guess, to achieve amplification through repetition. The Premier's midrange proved to be one of those standard-setting entities that makes a reviewer regret having used up all his or her superlatives on lesser components. The C-J's midrange was so sweet, so detailed, so...everything, that every other preamp I threw in my system sounded a bit crude, or pale, or confused in comparison."

I find these observations to be quite accurate. If there one word I would use to describe the Premier 17LS, it's sweetness.