Audiophilepure

https://www.stereophile.com/content/octave-audio-v70-class-integrated-amplifier

I started my vinyl listening with Bell Orchestre’s House Music (LP, Erased Tapes Records ERATP141LP-CA), a rock-classical hybrid instrumental work that includes several string instruments, group chanting, and a menagerie of seamlessly integrated studio sound effects. Via the Octave’s phono stage, the band sounded bigger than six members—more vaulted and sonically varied with a richer, more reverberant consistency. The V 70’s characteristic transparency, big-picture boldness, and the detail retrieval I’d heard with digital came through, if not quite to the same level. (That limitation could be a reflection more of the sources I was using than of the phono itself.)

Texture and transient tactility were conspicuous. On the first track, “Opening,” violin and double bass produced vibrant, rich-brown tone and vibrational texture that seemed serrated. The drums were focused, dynamically spry, and, judging by the arc of the drum hits, compact. The group chanting was almost Star Trek–y, with its extended-vowel, dashing-through–outer-space aura, vocally layered and luxuriantly toned. The phono stage emphasized the music’s coherency, both in the sense of a band playing together in the same room and in their creative complicity, the feeding-off-each-other group dynamic.

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