Audiophilepure

Some general comments first. The Wells Audio Dragon sounded excellent with the out-of-the-box settings. Most of my auditioning was on the Focal MG headphones, which are very revealing, and let me tell you, they reveal just about everything right or wrong with a recording.

I found the Schitt Valhalla 2 and the Dragon very close in sound. What the Valhalla lacked was any ability to tune the audio output by the flip of a switch and bring another tube into the circuit. Still, both amps sounded a bit mellower, especially in the mid-range on all recordings. This warm midrange is especially notable with vocalists and acoustics instruments. I found both amps to be accurate in the high frequencies, and there was ample bass.

Listening to the solid-state headphone amps (the output of the FiiO M15, and the output of my MacBook Pro outputting my Roon library through the Questyle M12 was also satisfying. The solid-state amps sounded like the tube amps but lacked the slightest bit of midrange warmth. In my listening tests, vocals always sounded better on the tubed-amps, and I could detect a slight bit more of the sound of the room (reverberation) in recordings done in a large venue.

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