Audiophilepure

The GA-10 comes packaged in regulation HiFi brown cardboard packaging. It’s not unusual, though by no means exciting, with simple prints on the outside denoting the Goldenwave brand on the outside (no HIFIMAN branding?). 

Inside, the unit is surrounded by heavy-duty foam inserts, though I would have preferred a vented tube amplifier wrapped in electrostatic shielding plastic or a protective fabric dust bag. 

My review sample came with a power plug for my region and setup for 220V. Yours will come with a plug and voltage rating applicable to your region, so it will vary.

Aside from the above, I got a short manual in Chinese, and again, I presume your retail unit will have the same manual in English.

I would also have liked to have seen a small Allan key included for lifting the top plate to access the tubes. The tube rolling community might be all over this one, given how affordable and easily obtainable these 

If the source presents a holographic image, the system will reproduce it with excellent accuracy.  This seems to be particularly true in Golden Age Decca recordings.  (Fred is very fond of the Decca sound and views it as a model of fine reproduction.)  However, the imaging can be great with other labels, and with Redbook CDs, and, particularly, with SACDs played through the newly updated EMM DA2i.  (See the recent review published in Dagogo.)

While the system shines with excellent source material, an interesting development in the last few years is that the system accommodates less-than-excellent material as well.  It is almost as if the designers recognized that us listeners would from time-to-time want to listen to some particular musician or piece of music that was simply unavailable in a top notch recording and considered that in the voicing of the gear.  Of course, some records, or CDs, sound so lousy that we take them off rather than endure, but this rarely happens.  It used to happen more.

For serious listening with “life-size” images and at comparable volumes (though not fully life-size, of course – I just mean this as a general descriptor), there is no system that I – personally – enjoy more than this system that I have described that resides down the street from me.  However, in fairness to a few other systems, I can enjoy something different for different circumstances.  For example, I have a library system based around the relatively inexpensive Audio Note AN-K speakers and Oto integrated amp that I relish for less serious, lower-volume listening.  For that matter, I can enjoy listening in the car.  Music fits into my life – as it no doubt does with most readers – in more than one size and flavor.

On the downside, at first, the bass drivers seemed a touch stiff and limited when playing bass-rich tracks like “Your Momma Don’t Dance” on Kenny Loggins’s Outside: From the Redwoods album. Also, the tweeter seemed a bit rolled-off at the top. These apparent weaknesses become more apparent when compared to my reference $16,000 Usher ML-802 loudspeakers. A foot taller, almost twice as heavy (at 128 pounds to the ATC’s 68.31 lbs.), and sporting two eight-inch bass drivers to the ATC’s single, 6 1/2″ woofer, the Ushers dug deeper in the lower frequencies, and using its magnesium alloy tweeter, it had more extended highs than the ATCs, with their handmade tweeters. 

Within a week, the SCM40’s tweeters began opening up, and the low-frequency drivers began loosening up as well. They still couldn’t compete with the Ushers (that are rated to go down to 26Hz, versus the conservatively rated 48Hz for the ATCs) in the lower octaves. But, in all fairness, I knew that going in and had planned on auditioning the ATCs SCM40s with a pair of subwoofers to better pressurize the roughly 960 square feet area like the Ushers had been doing all along (I originally chose the Usher ML-802s, with their pair of eight-inch bass drivers, over their single bass driver Usher ML-801 that I had previously reviewed because of this large space).