This Preamp Costs More Than a Fancy Sports Car

The first box, the one with the buttons, dials, and display, houses the pre-amplification electronics. It’s where your source equipment—turntable, network streamer, whatever you fancy—connects using the generous selection of balanced and unbalanced inputs. The other two boxes are external power supplies serving the left and right channels of your stereo signal.

Goldmund reckons this radical separation, along with painstaking internal architecture featuring complete symmetry, voltage regulation stages, and optimized heat dissipation, guarantees signal integrity and utterly consistent operating conditions in all circumstances.

It’s apparently not enough to make a preamplifier with such a low total harmonic distortion figure (0.0002 percent) that it’s extremely difficult to measure in the first place. No, it has to be housed in three chassis with mirrored-glass displays, metal-coated controls, and Goldmund’s signature slender gold-line design flourish to confirm its identity.

In the US, the Goldmund Mimesis Statement analog preamplifier costs $240,000. No, I didn’t accidentally add a few zeros. We’re already into “fairly fancy European sports car” territory here, but a preamplifier by itself doesn’t constitute an audio system. For the Mimesis Statement to do its thing, it needs a music input signal, which it will output to a power amplifier. From there, it goes to a pair of speakers.

Thankfully, Goldmund offers plenty of options. During my listen to the Mimesis Statement, it is connected to the company’s Eidos network streamer (yours for $27,000) at one end and a pair of Thelos 9800 power amplifiers (nearly 800 pounds per amplifier, 1,560 watts per channel, an imposing aesthetic, and $500,000 each) at the other. The amplified signal then moves to a pair of Theia Passive four-way floor-standing loudspeakers ($215,000 for two). That’s a total system price of $1,482,000—not so much “sports car” as “very nice apartment, probably with a balcony.” And I haven’t even added in the price of cables.