Audiophilepure

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“Piano stage left, ringing out with all the naturalness you could hope to hear. Audience arrayed around and to the sides, percussion on the right. Ray himself just left of centre, precisely where the pianist/vocalist would be sitting. Silky, smooth, open – ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’ was punctuated by authentic-sounding saxophone and brass while the ‘door knocking’ on the snare drum had punch and crispness to dazzle.

Above all, it was sounding so spacious that it delivered what I couldn’t quite derive from the live McCartney feed. The Vena II Play was an open window into this audiophile-grade recording. £799? I am humbled.”

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“Finally, regarding the power supply, the smaller amps have one third more storage capacitance. All .8 models still use very large Plitron toroidal transformers, and have new On/Off switching and high current delay, allowing conformance with the stand-by draw of 1 Watt. The front-end circuits have larger power supply decoupling, “This coupled with interleaved layout techniques has reduced the output noise of the amplifiers by another 10 dB. The range between peak output and average noise floor is greater than 130 dB.”

Even in the vault-like room, the noise level of the XA200.8 through even higher efficiency speakers is to my ear nonexistent. Note that 130dB is in the range of Class D amps! The only time I heard a peep from these monoblock amps was sometimes, when warming up or cooling, a tine of the heatsink fins might ping once or twice, but not continuously. The quietness set the stage for music played at a moderately high listening level to explode from the coveted “black background”— an exciting experience!”

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“Next I went all old-school audiophile — I had a feeling the Plinius would have a field day. I loaded up “Only Time,” from The Very Best of Enya (16/44.1 FLAC, Reprise/Qobuz), and raised the volume on the Hegel until the SPL meter on my phone measured 85dB at the listening position. The sound was fully enveloping, the Plinius melding with the Vimbergs to produce dense images on a vast soundstage. The bass was strong but more round than square, and the feathery highs were miles from harsh. “Caribbean Blue” was next, from Enya’s Shepherd Moons (16/44.1 FLAC, Reprise/Qobuz), and the sound was just right. Her lead and overdubbed backing vocals were clear and just a touch upfront, but the characteristic that set the A-150 apart from most other solid-state amps I’ve heard was the density of tonal color. This amp gave me the gestalt of what music should be — full, rich, dense — without primarily focusing on detail retrieval and transparency.”

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“An area where the No.333 excelled was dynamics. I never got the sense that I was running out of headroom, even on high-level, percussion-heavy recordings. Yet, perhaps more important for a high-power amplifier, the Levinson remained transparent at very low levels. Often, the designer’s need to use multiple pairs of transistors to obtain the combination of high output voltage and output current results in a murkiness at low levels. This wasn’t the case with this amplifier: in the performance of the Brahms Horn Trio on Stereophile’s Serenade CD, there is a magical moment when horn soloist Julie Landsman (first chair of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra) and violinist Sheryl Staples (associate concertmaster at Cleveland) are playing the slow movement’s theme triple-pianissimo. When I made the recording at the 1995 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, I tried to capture the full dynamic range of the live sound, which meant that this elegiac passage peaks at no more than –50dBFS. Yet with the Levinson driving the B&W Silver Signaturess, you could easily hear the slight unevenness in the violin tone that results from the player not using vibrato and drawing the bow very slowly across the string. This is one transparent amplifier.”

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“Just when I’ve been moaning to myself about how expensive everything has gotten in high-end sound, the Akitika GT-102 comes along and blows that complaint out of the water. It ain’t perfect, but it is a satisfying amplifier if you match it properly. Dan Joffe’s design and implementation proves you don’t have to be a one percenter to play in the high-end audio game. The assembled, tested, GT-102 amp goes for $488 plus $26 shipping in the lower 48 states. The kit version is $314 (really?) plus $26 shipping in the lower 48 states.”

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“Let’s start with the latest version of the well-established TL-6.5. Wedging the full feature set and functionality of the company’s two-box flagship line-stage into a single chassis was no easy feat, requiring a vertical extension to the established casework used for the TL-7.5’s PSU and control section. The resulting box can be supplied in silver, black or two-tone mix, the latter making the most of the original’s elegant design and front-panel proportions. On the inside it houses a fully balanced and differential circuit built around a single pair of ECC82 tubes, used for the critical voltage gain. Paired with a sophisticated FET-buffered, high-current output stage, you could argue that this should be more properly described as a hybrid design, but frankly, I’m more interested in the performance than the labels. With its large and highly regulated power supply, what the 6.5 does is deliver the coherent dynamics and presence that make tube pre-amps so musically appealing, combined with an incredibly low noise floor and the ability to drive almost any load – both extremely unusual in a tube design. Even more unusual is the functional versatility, with a full suit of balanced and single-ended in and outputs, processor and tape loops, adjustable overall and individual input gain. Look inside and you find a mirror-imaged circuit, precision resistor ladders and more by-pass capacitors than you can shake a stick at. The package is topped off with a sensibly sized, full function remote and a display that you can actually see from across the room.”

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“Triode: I’m a big fan of SETs. With the right speakers and a great vinyl setup, there’s nothing I enjoy more in high end audio. The sweetness, the light, the layering of subtleties, the inner workings of musicians’ minds laid bare. All are heard under a quality SET setup. I found that less so under the push pull variety. So, although the folks at Allnic quite rightly suggest ‘SET like’ sound for its triode mode, it was more of an aspiration than a full SET experience. Beetles suggestion regarding the 200 hours break in may well add some delicacy to the triode sound. I wish I had the unit longer. ”

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“Dan has been threatening to produce a true, no-limits amplifier for as long as I have known him. This is it. What I heard the Relentless amps do was – without any notion of hyperbole – demonstrate what sound without power limitations can be. This is not to suggest for a moment that one cannot live with less; neither is it to insinuate that there are no other systems so blissfully free of constraint. That said, they are few in number, and must be built around the most sensitive of speakers. The Relentless needs no such accommodation.”

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“Where it didn’t quite match the pricier amplifiers that I’ve recently had in my system like the D’Agostino Relentless, which comes in at a cool $250,000 a pair, or the Ypsilon Hyperions, is in the ultimate degree of relaxation and grip and control. It may sound wacky, but the fact is that there is even more performance to be had than this amplifier delivers. That’s something CH knows—and why you can go up the line in its offerings to bigger and better amps. But make no mistake: What the A1.5 offers you is more than an introduction to the high end. It constitutes an invitation to a high level of performance that is unlikely to leaving you feeling neutral about its sonic prowess.”