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The Leben RS28CX is about hot red meat, flesh & blood realism and music suffused with the feeling of life pounding in your veins. It's the antithesis of those phony audiophile sonics with their bleached timbres and etched sound, screeching muted trumpets and spooky unrealistic see-through ghost-like images that make me want to run from the room screaming. No sir, I'll take the Leben's red-blooded and life-like presentation any day and please bring me a nice bottle of red wine and a juicy slab of prime rib to enjoy along with it. Burp.
Take the excellent Joe Pass Virtuoso series of compact discs on Pablo that were produced
by Norman Grantz. These discs highlight virtuoso Joe's considerable musical talent as a solo jazz guitarist and are a must have mind blower for everyone who loves jazz guitar. The Leben presents Joe's music as smooth, natural and a touch warmish. There is deeply hued tone, lots of musical texture, a revelation of musical expressiveness in Joe's playing and a temporal magic that gives life-likeness to the recordings.

For this review, I was spinning vinyl on a Merrill Heritage turntable completely restored by Anthony Scillia and mounted with a Rega RB300 tonearm, a Pete Riggle Audio counterweight & VTAF, and a Clearaudio Virtuoso Wood moving-magnet cartridge. It's a beauty both visually and musically and was provided to me on short-term loan by 6moons reader Joe Kelley via Pete Riggle - thanks for the awesome experience, guys!


The phono stage in the Leben RS28CX preamplifier musically kicks the living crap out of all other phono stage I've encountered and it's so nice to see a fairly priced vacuum tube preamplifier with such an awesome phono stage. There's a lot of value here for the music lover. My Acoustic Sounds test pressing of Bill Evans Trio's Waltz for Debby became a luxurious and rich musical experience. This recording splendidly captures all the little cues of the intimacy of life in the Village Vanguard in 1961 where the recording was made. The music is infused with natural musical warmth; a deeply hued tonal palette of Bill's piano playing, nice tight bass playing by Scott LaFaro and superb drumming by Paul Motain.

The music is alive and breathing with the shimmer of Paul's cymbals, Scott's flowing bass line, and Bill's melodic playing. The Leben really makes it easy to get lost in how good this music is. It was so sublime, I had to pull myself out of a musical reverie to talk about the splendid sonics: a huge sound space, wide and deep soundstaging, imaging with a lot of body and natural sizing, lots of nuance and articulate decay of notes, tight & punchy bass - that's for you audiophiles who care about such stuff. There's also plenty of air and detail so you can hear the individual wires on Paul's cymbal brushes but such detail never drew me out of the music flow. The sonics of the Leben RS28CX phono stage, while quite extraordinary, are also artfully voiced to be natural and life-like, and always positioned to be in a support role to the music itself - just as they should be.

On my copy of the RCA Living Stereo record The Royal Ballet Gala Performances, I was very impressed by how well the Leben RS28CX phono stage captured both the excitement and beauty of this phenomenal performance. I was easily drawn into the mood and feel of this amazing music, its deeply saturated and intensely involving tone. The music flows from the Leben in a completely unfettered and unforced fashion with natural sensual presence. The sound too is very good and I'm amazed that the Leben can be so powerfully emotive while still so good in the sonic sense. In Gala Performances the Leben gives a vast sense of completely natural space, lots of musically natural detail and the strings take on a richly rosinous, naturally detailed persona. There is also a lyrical flow of musical development that's positively spellbinding. It keeps me anticipating with excitement the powerful emotive nature of the
unfolding musical drama. The highs are extended, clean and utterly natural. The treble balance is so canny and beautiful that I can't imagine any music lover not being deliriously happy with the Leben RS28CX's phono stage. It is truly a benchmark design for music lovers.

Wrapping Up
The beautifully crafted $5795 Leben RS28CX Premium Vacuum Tube Stereo Preamplifier from the design studio of Mr. Taku Hyodo is a music lover’s dream component. Exquisitely voiced, it unfailingly gets the music right regardless of medium. The Leben RS28CX is always musically expressive in the way music is in real life. I bought the Leben RS28CX for my own personal musical enjoyment and to serve as a benchmark in preamplifier design for the Music Lovers series. I wish there was something above a Blue Moon award because this component certainly deserves it. But a Blue Moon Award in the Music Lovers category will have to suffice. Absolutely, freakily good and as such, most highly recommended to music lovers everywhere!

Quality of packing: I was impressed by the thoughtfulness evidenced in the Leben RS28CX packaging. Leben used double boxing that should be easily reusable multiple times but I doubt you'd need to since only a kook would let this beauty go. The preamplifier section and its separate power supply were meticulously packed in separate boxes inside the shipping carton. The packing showed extraordinary attention to detail with a combination of foam inserts, protective cardboard cutouts and wrapping of the preamp and its power supply in heavy plastic bagging. Even the power cords had the connector ends wrapped in bubble pack, and then were wrapped in plastic bags, with the entire cord wrapped in bubble packing. Incredible attention to detail!
Quality of owner's manual: Owner's manual? What owner's manual? You wouldn't read it anyway so why worry.
Condition of component received: Flawless.
Completeness of delivery: Perfect.
Website comments: Nicely done.
Warranty: 2 years parts & labor, tubes excepted.
Human interactions: Professional, helpful and friendly.
Pricing: Expensive in real world terms but an excellent value for such an incredibly musical device with such impeccable build quality.
Final comments & suggestions: While I didn't mention it sooner, the Leben RS28CX is something akin to a Swiss Army Knife of preamplifiers. It works well with a wide variety of electronics and always seems to bring out their best. I would recommend requesting that your RS28CX be fitted with Allen head screws rather than Phillips. The Phillips screws are soft and the heads easily deform unless you have a perfect fit with your screwdriver as mine did when I popped the tops off for the photo shoot. Lastly and as I mentioned earlier, if you really want a Leben RS28CX, don't sit on your hands too long - you may never get another chance.
Leben Hifi website
US importer's website