Audiophilepure

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“After spending so much time listening to George Bernard Shaw’s two favorite composers, I found myself in the mood to hear something from Brahms, whom the playwright and occasional music critic—the latter under the name Corno di Basseto—held in contempt. The Air Tight did a lovely job with Rafael Kubelik and the Vienna Philharmonic’s recording of Brahms’s Symphony 1 (LP, London CS 6016). String and woodwind tones throughout were lusciously textured and colorful, but not pushed to unrealistic extremes in those regards: tones were beautiful and faithful. The kettledrum in the introductory measures had realistic force, and a convincing increase in intensity leading to that portion’s climax. In the scherzo-like third movement, both the clarinet’s tone and the believability of the air surrounding it in the recording space were remarkable—and the ATM-300R conveyed the rhythmic change as the bubbly first part led into the more accented rhythms of the Trio section. The sound was consistently involving, and held my attention right through the smooth transition into the final movement, with the swooping strings allowed a believable sense of scale: Here, as in Das Rheingold, the Air Tight was capable of letting the music sound big.”
R

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“A recent discovery I’ve made through Tidal is the singer Chlara’s Evo Sessions (24/96 FLAC/MQA, Evolution Media/Tidal). It’s a very spare, pure-sounding recording of, I believe, only acoustic instruments. Chlara does a beautiful job on track 9, Cat Stevens’s “Wild World” — mostly because of her earnest and achingly sweet voice, which is pristinely recorded and placed solidly at center stage. Such a recording shows exactly why the MTRX2 can be considered a gentle giant. Sitting on the floor, a pair of them are imposing — some might even think them brutish because of their big, boxy looks. But powering the Revel Ultima2 Salon2s, they reproduced Chlara’s voice with the utmost delicacy and refinement. The sound had an airy, light quality you wouldn’t necessarily expect from such big solid-state mono amps — at least if you’re an old-school thinker who believes that high power and high refinement can’t coexist. Yet her voice also had a sense of urgency — I could feel even her subtlest inflections of note and word, as if she were singing to me in real life. This was even more apparent with “This Love,” which has a livelier, jazzier feel. I don’t like the song nearly as much as “Wild World,” but the EMMs and Revels reproduced her voice with such immediacy and purity that I could only sit and listen, and not criticize — I was captivated by how realistically and natural Chlara sounded.

Having heard that quality of reproduction of a woman’s voice, I turned to a male singer: Adam Cohen, and his album We Go Home (16/44.1 WAV, Cooking Vinyl). I played the entire album straight through, so engrossed was I with what was coming out of the Salon2s. Immediately afterward, what popped to mind was how well Cohen’s voice had been conveyed — the EMMs’ velvet-smooth sound and sky-high resolution made it sound so authentic. The next thing that came to mind was that I knew, deep down, that it was this sound’s inherent rightness that had compelled me to listen to the entire album and not think of skipping to another track or album. What rightness in music reproduction means exactly is difficult or impossible to put into words. It’s easier to say that it’s something you experience, and that you know it when you hear it — not unlike looking at a great painting and having the image take your breath away, but without being able to explain exactly why.”

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“This is an exceptionally quiet amplifier whatever source is selected. Only when using the phono-stage did I ever hear any noise, though that is to be expected. All sources go through a choice of 24bit/96kHz or 24bit/192kHz digital stage, the heart or “intelligence” of the Pro as they refer to it, though at no time in my listening did I even consider this could degrade the sound. First listening was digital via the excellent Krell KPS20i CD player. Vincent Belanger “Pure Cello” is a beautiful CD, produced by Audio Note. This was an engaging performance. The solo cello playing was a positive and forceful performance without being over-powering or tiring. Indeed, all analogue sources I connected into the line input gave a positive performance in terms of accuracy of sound and covering all frequencies with a flat response. Listening to ‘Live at the Citadel’ from my friends The Enid was deep in bass yet top frequencies were equally detailed and clean, with a good sense of being there in the audience. I originally heard the band in the 1970’s and fell in love with the references to Rachmaninov in much of the music as well as the use of synthesiser. The soundstage was large and detailed, without sounding clinical. Listening to sources via USB and SPDif was equally detailed and spacious giving some of the best performances whether FLAC, WAV or DSD. Pat Metheny ‘The Way Up’ and the second track confusingly named “Part One” had a great top end and bass that was relaxed but authoritative. Similarly, Muse Resistance album and “Uprising” has a deep bass at the start which was clean and clinical, though no less enjoyable. Listening to Supertramp ‘Breakfast in America’ on CD the sound was noticeably digitised than when I play my vinyl version of the album. Interestingly, playing it from vinyl, which still goes through a 24/192 ADC, sounded superior. The Devialet performed well in all I played, whether analogue or digital, though vocals and mid-frequencies were more forward in the presentation. Indeed, whilst the Expert 220 Pro worked great with all types of music and instrumentation my only slight concerns as a critical reviewer was a very slight sibilance with some vocals (mainly female), and the sound lacking some warmth in performance.

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“Nelson Pass is that rare type of audio-engineering maverick who measures and listens with equal facility. He’s not wasting his time and your money trying to cram a thousand crap watts into a marketing department’s bling box. He does not believe that all measurable “distortions” are, willy-nilly, enemies of high-fidelity sound. Instead, he focuses his considerable intelligence and resources not only on reducing various types of distortion, but also on studying the essential natures of those distortions. He uses blind listening and ABX testing to understand how experienced listeners perceive distortion, and the role that distortion might play in helping our brains reconstruct the original musical event. In the SIT-3, Pass has allowed a carefully prescribed dose of negative-phase second-harmonic distortion to appear at low levels, with a tiny touch of third-harmonic distortion at higher powers. The second harmonic, he says, “fosters an illusion of expanded space and image specificity; the third appears to improve dynamics.”