FS Croft Special Epoch Elite Pre Amp

Captain · May 22, 2008

For sale my Special Croft Epoch Elite . I am the second owner of this amp when I received it a little over 2 years ago I sent it off to Croft for upgrading and service and again a few months later for more work, I spent around £450. This amp was already quite special and had been sent to Croft regularly for tweaking and servicing before I brought it, this was all confirmed to me by Amar at Eminent Audio. As you can see the case work is pretty cool all chrome chassis and thick brushed aluminium frontage this alone would cost over £250. I also have black casing which is the one I use as it matches my Croft power. I could not use the chrome on my power amp as it did not pull the heat off some new tubes that had been installed, so Glenn advised to go for the cast metal so had to buy the black for both so they would match. Both enclosures come with sale, although I only have black screws so silver would need to be brought if you want to match the chrome. I cannot find invoice for work done but can forward the emails from Eminent Audio/Croft for all work done. Also if you check out Croft customer comments HERE and read down you can see that I mentioned how impressed I was with the work on the 5/6/2006.

Here is the list of upgrades as written in emails

Email one 12/3/06

The o/p stage of the preamp now uses the Low impedance Panasonic caps; these are one of the best caps for the purpose at anywhere near sensible cost.
The phono psu is upgraded, it still uses Siemens caps (which are superb), and now has a specially designed Pi filter before the HT to extract Rf and other noise.
Wiring looms have been reduced within and it was unnecessary to use virtual wiring - this is evident if you look at its electro-architecture.

Email two 31/5/06

Paralleled up 4.7uf caps (PURE SILVER 1MM SOLID CORE WIRE) - with existing PP output caps.
Similar type but ones now coupled bigger value and better quality.
Output cables changed to 1mm silver wire.
Also two PIO caps on phono were leaking so I changed these for high quality PP's, it will give an improvement in phono as well as being stable (leaking caps add all sorts of spuriae).
Power supply cap changed from Suntan to the Starget -
BYPASSED THIS with silver foil Transcap (Jensen silver foil).

A couple of other things: when I brought amp there were some oak cones stuck on with glue to the bottom of case, these were removed and plastic disks put on top to cover up mark left. Looks a pretty neat job. Also there is a small scuff on the bottom again pretty minor.

This is a very good sounding dual mono pre amp, I have heard it next to a lot of other Croft pre amps when I went over to visit, and can say it stands up very well next to the new crop of amps which are (were) being built by Glenn.

Would want £650 which would includes fully insured next day postage in the UK.