Cello preamp pictures

[ANALOG GUY]

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[ANALOG GUY]

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[Bonsai]

All those control knobs on the front plate - they drive me nuts.

I don't know if I like the power supply that much!

Is this the same Cello that had the tone controls? I cannot read from the photos.

How much did they sell this pre-amp for?

Still, nice pice of engineering.

[GeeVee]

Hi all.

Nice looking preamp. Looks beautifully made.

Lots of controls. I must admit that I am a bit of a knob bloke.
Personally, I would like to see within the specifications "knobs per square foot!! - just joking.

On a serious note, was / is Cello somehow tied in with Mark Levinson systems?

I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that this was a company spinoff . However I may be wrong.

Regards,
George.

[jacco vermeulen]

Mark Levinson started Cello in the early 80s after flunking the final exam at the ML corporation.
Tom Colangelo left with him to set up Cello, Mr Colangelo was the Cello design guy.
Rumor has it that MarkyMark had his girlfriend do the endless labor of semi matching for the first Cello products, i have a picture of one of his female love laborers.

Mark's girly girly tap still remained too high, and Cello was also left over to people with a true business appeal.
Mark flunks overpriced China gear nowadays, sometimes writes books together with hardcore porn actrices.
Mr Colangelo has his own Viola company where he designs and builds beautifull flower amps.

[GeeVee]

Hi Jacco

Thanks for the reply.

I definately did not know that. I always thought that Mark was the brains / chief engineer, because the equipment was named after him.

The only thing that I remember from Cello, was a ridiculously overpriced passive preamp.

It was nothing more than a selector switch and an attenuator.

I remember reading an article on this preamp many years ago.

This is what made me think that it was perhaps a subsidary of ML.

Regards,
George.

[jacco vermeulen]

Bit confusing, i agree.

The current Cello owner Mr McCullough has worked both for Madrigal (= Mark Levinson) and for the early Cello ltd company untill it went bankrupt 5/6 years ago.
Safe to say that everyone who has met Mr Levinson finds him an entertaining fellow.

Very pricy, but the Cello products from the second half of the '80s i've heard do ring your bell.
The modular Audio Suite pre-amp and the Audio Palette tone controll unit still are gems.
Here's one of the blue cap things you see in the last posted picture of the Palette Pre, a Roederstein KP1830 high freq. polypropylene and aluminium foil capacitor, even pretty neat stuff nowadays.
(should be, a 10nF/1% costs a buck fifty currently, better not leave words to diyA sharks how many i have)