Audiophilepure

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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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” For my listening tests I first hooked up Ragnarok to my Magnepan .7 flat panel speakers, precisely because they are far and away the best speakers I’ve heard for the money, but they’re a brutal load for amplifiers, and most AV receivers and budget integrated amps never come close to making the .7 speakers sing. The Ragnarok fully exploited these speakers potential.”

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” The orchestral strings of the Trondheim Soloists, in Marianne Thorsen’s recordings of Mozart’s Violin Concertos Nos 4-5 (24/352.8 FLAC, 2L), were smooth without sounding dull, with a wonderful sense of envelopment of Thorsen’s violin by the orchestra, even as soloist and ensemble remained clearly distinct from each other. At very high volume levels, the IDA-8 could make the violins sound a bit hard. But at levels that to me are adequate — but that some might consider quite loud — the NuPrime remained wholly composed. The same was true of pop recordings such as Carly Rae Jepsen’s surprisingly well-produced E·mo·tion (24/44.1 FLAC, Universal), which the IDA-8 had no problem reproducing at high levels. Jepsen’s voice is quite closely miked and exhibits moderate sibilance, but the IDA-8 reproduced it with neutral, easygoing sound, while having enough power to drive both the GoldenEar Triton Fives and KEF R900s to volumes high enough that I could immensely enjoy the high-energy pop sensibility of her performance.”