Audiophilepure

Tracking through a wide variety of different music is a joy with the VT-150. It is dynamic enough to play classical music or heavy rock as loud as you need yet offers great linearity at lower volumes. Even listening to the CSN debut album on MoFi at very low levels with the Dynaudio Confidence 20s is incredibly engaging. Yet cranking the volume way up for some Public Enemy and Slayer proves it delivers the goods.

in addition to having solid, controlled extension on both ends of the frequency scale, this amplifier can generate a large sound field in all three dimensions. There’s a lot of “vacuum tube magic” going on here, to be sure.

And, putting a $2,500-$3,000 amplifier in the context of the $7,500 to $15k system it is more than likely going to end up in will leave you thrilled with the purchase. If you’ve been dreaming of investigating a tube amplifier, I can think of no better place to start your journey. Perhaps at some point, we will commandeer a second one to investigate how these perform as monoblocks. For now, staffer Jerold O’Brien will be using this one on a daily. His daughter took the VT-70, so how can you argue with that?

Honestly, with the sheer number of features packed into this little amp, it’s hard to not like it! Wi-Fi, AirPlay, or Bluetooth 5.0 are all ways to wirelessly connect to it, not to mention all the wired options. It would be hard to find a setup that this amp wouldn’t work with. The app is ok, not great but ok. Did I mention it also includes a remote? I would be interested to see a more powerful version of this amp in the future, but all-in-all I think for $199 it’s a solid option for most users!

I didn’t have any issues in my testing of the amp, it does include a one-year warranty which is always nice to see. I think this little amp would hold up for a good number of years and then some. I would like to see some updates to the app, it’s rather basic in design but has a lot of room for improvement.

Occasionally, before putting something on that I knew to be a little thin and edgy, I’d mentally ask the 452iQs to be a pal and help a brother out. Nah, that’s not their thing. Yes, they have a wonderful sense of flow.  Yes, they reveal complex harmonic and dynamic textures in a recording without adding any noticeable additional texture or obvious slowing of the dynamic envelope. No, they will not magically be your bro and smooth over the treble or pump up the bass on an edgy and/or bass light recording.

At this level of the audiophile mountaintop, the gear is supposed to be as unerringly faithful as possible to what’s on a recording. But for me, there is good clean and not so good clean. Marginal clean has something in the sound that is missing or is off in some way that is hard to put your finger on. Everything might sound impressive – but somehow, I’m not drawn to the music. I might be having a fun time in a cerebral way by marveling at all the detail, bass slam, or whatever, but I’m not really listening to the music.

The VAC Statement 452iQ is my idea of a good clean. Surely it has something to do with using vacuum tubes and transformers, but I think it has more to do with what designer Kevin Hayes likes to hear. I think he is like me and certain other audiophiles in the sense that, yes, we want to hear everything, but not at the expense of musical involvement. I found the 452iQ to be everything I want to hear in the way of limitless dynamics, 3-dimensional imaging, and wide frequency bandwidth but beyond all that, these amps are musically involving. These days, I don’t want to be steered into listening to the gear; I want to listen to the music. More than a few times, I felt that I was hearing a familiar favorite recording for the first time. Not as in new little details emerging, but a macro sense of simply hearing it.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/audio-note-meishu-tonmeister-phono-integrated-amplifier

 only talked about vinyl, because I had my best experiences with vinyl. But I also used the Meishu with my HoloAudio May DAC. The combination was rich and fluid and brought me many hours of musical satisfaction and surprise.

In 2011, Art Dudley wrote in his review of the Audio Note Jinro integrated of “an abundance of that often-noted-yet-never-explained ‘SET sound’ that allows solo voices and instruments to stand musically and spatially proud of the rest of the mix.” That, certainly, is part of what I heard with this Meishu amplifier. It framed every recording within its unique space with meatiness and viscosity, drive and dynamics, deep tone and texture.

Words fail to express the satisfaction I derived listening to music through this expensive Audio Note integrated amplifier. I’ve got nothing bad to say about it—except for the air thing, if you care about that. I detected no (other) anomalies, artifacts, sonic peculiarities, or outright shortcomings. The Tonmeister, together with the Audio Note SUT I auditioned it with, took what I hear from my vinyl collection and made it better, portraying each performance as a singular, unique event occurring at a particular time and place, its secrets revealed.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/rotel-ra-6000-integrated-amplifier

Neither Rotel’s website nor the RA-6000 owner’s manual give any specifications (power, gain, and output impedance for example) for their 1/8″ front-panel headphone output. So I asked Coates for more information. “The headphone output on the RA-6000 is designed to be used with most lower-impedance headphone designs. 32 ohms is the design reference, but there’s plenty of drive for headphones of slightly higher impedances as well,” he wrote in an email. “600 ohm, low sensitivity monsters need not apply, though! The rated output is 120mW into 32 ohms full bandwidth at less than 0.02% THD. Distortion rises quickly beyond that point, with a maximum rated output of 140mW [also into 32 ohms]. Output impedance of the headphone amplifier circuit is rated at 680 ohms.” (footnote 1) The specified gain at the headphone output is 14.8dB.

Those specifications caused me to wonder: What headphones might a typical RA-6000 owner use? I didn’t have a ¼” to 1/8″ adapter, so I reached for my use-it-all-the-time, works-with-every-amp Sony MDR-Z1R headphones, which employ dynamic drivers, cost $1798, and come stock with a 1/8″ plug. Their 100dB/ mW sensitivity and 64 ohm impedance classifies them as easy to drive, and their style suggests something a Brooklyn hipster might use if they owned a Rotel integrated.

Toward the conclusion of this evaluation, I challenged the S300 a final time. Thanks to the generosity of MBL’s North American distributor (for which I’m forever grateful) I still had the remarkable MBL 126 compact Radialstrahlers on hand. And if there was an octave range where the S300 might show a little temperament, it would be through one of the most transparent midrange/tweeter combinations I’ve ever experienced. Few loudspeakers are more revealing of timbre and texture or as transparent and sensitive to low-level detail as these marvelous omnidirectional three-way compacts. However, they are sensitive to electronics, demanding accurate, reliable. and generous amounts of power. I typically drive them with MBL’s own Cadenza C51 180Wpc integrated ($9800), a Jürgen Reis-designed Linear Analog Switching Amplifier (LASA). The Stellar S300 put forth an excellent effort driving the Radialstrahlers. On larger-scale brass and wind pieces like the sweeping Liberty Fanfare [Wilson Audio], they demonstrated superb command and control over the barrage of heavy percussion. But in direct comparison, the S300 lacked the epic bass extension and hard-core slam of the MBL C51, a trademark of Reis designs. The top end might have been a little drier, too, lacking the effortless harmonic bloom of the MBL amp. Nonetheless, the S300 put on an impressive show, to say the least.

https://www.hifinews.com/content/ps-audio-bhk-m600-power-amplifier

More controlled aggression was also in evidence with The Stone Roses’ cheekily titled sophomore album The Second Coming [Geffen 424 503-2], which might be blighted by vocalist Ian Brown’s slap-dash approach to singing in tune but has a thrilling ‘in-the-live-room’ production. The standout track ‘Daybreak’ benefited from the BHK M600’s out-of-the-blocks slam, giving the loose-limbed rhythm section an epic scale to match the spotlight shone on John Squire’s outro guitar solo.

From the same album, ‘Good Times’ ends in a glorious upbeat jam, drummer John ‘Reni’ Wren flitting between ride and crash cymbals, bassist Mani running up and down the fretboard and Squire again squealing away on his Les Paul. It was a performance of extravagant energy, detail and panache. These amps let the good times roll.

https://www.hifinews.com/content/halcro-dm58-monoblock

But Halcro isn’t tunnel-visioned, so the company also recognises that there are other benefits, including the way that separated, screened boxes perfectly suit vertical stacking to create a small footprint. Well, ‘Aussie small’ at least, because however much Halcro wants to boast that each 56.75kg unit occupies less floor space than most conventional amplifiers, a 400x400mm footprint is hardly Cinderella-esque. Height, by the way, is an awe-inspiring 790mm, so a pair of dm58s monoblocks is a sight to behold.

Cleverly, the company also points out that this ‘aesthetically relates well to the typical vertical speaker formats’, and I have to admit that they looked right at home next to the Wilson WATT Puppy System 6 they were driving. Also mentioned on the unit’s behalf were the fact that freestanding amps don’t require support stands and that the sheer acreage provides maximum surface area for heat dissipation. No matter how hard these were driven, they never got more than lukewarm.