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” Comparing the two class A champs netted two quite distinct flavours. The Magnus played what seemed like a virtual stand-in for the EJ Sarmento-rebooted James Bongiorno Son of Ampzilla II. I obviously couldn’t isolate whether this was down to shared versus dissimilar transistors types. Here the play pen was about BJT versus Mosfet. Did this difference merely reiterate their core signatures which anyone intimately familiar with either device would recognize? Regardless, the MA-260 focused down on the more compact, with sharper crisper edging and a cooler more bluish colour temp. The XA30.8 was the spatially more expansive and generous, its focus not locked down as hard, its outlines softer and the overall hue more honey and warm. Purely by outcome, I thought of the Magnus as endowed with more 3rd-order THD than the Pass. Shifting harmonic distribution from 2nd to 3rd-order preponderance usually nets exactly this offset. Whether here it was the actual cause is wholly academic. The task is to describe sonic flavours in terms experienced listeners can relate to. If you’ve more versed in basic tube types, the MA-260 played to pentode-run EL84 precedents like Trafomatic Audio’s Kaivalya monos, the XA30.8 more to 845 triode specimens.”

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