Audiophilepure

ZZ Top bass player Dusty Hill sadly passed away toward the end of my listening, so I paid my respects by putting Tejas [Warner Bros] on the turntable and allowing the Rega Aphelion 2’s stylus to work its way across side A to the fabulous ‘Enjoy and Get it On’. The needle was sufficiently warmed by the third track for the raw sound of the band’s precision boogie to really get under my skin and by the time the desired track came around it was smoking, Billy Gibbons’ guitar delivering a scorching solo over the perfectly synched rhythms of Hill and drummer Frank Beard. With a digital source supplying a line level signal you get a bit more detail and finesse than the onboard DAC with equally impressive timing but in truth the result wasn’t dramatically superior to the onboard converter, and that, for a £2.5k component, is a decent result.

The term I would use is stoic. Don’t expect audio fireworks or a warm hug kind of sound. Yet the Parasound JC 1+ does all the things you’d expect an amp of this caliber to do. There was no major sense of lack of color or excitement, they simply tell a speaker to move like the music moves, just not in quite the same way that those ultra-mega-buck vacuum tube or solid state amps do. Now that I’ve gotten used to a high level of performance in my system, I find color to be very overrated. Yes, I still love the listening experience I get with vinyl and tubes. However, even in that area my taste has evolved to the cleanest sounding of tubes and record playing devices and similarly with solid state gear. But I’m very picky about the exact kind of clean.

On my wish list for the Parasound JC 1+ would be a very slightly bloomier low end along with a smidgen of extra juice to the mids. No, the amps never sounded thin, but for me most stuff I played didn’t quite have the harmonic juice and sense of thickness and density that I hear in most tube amps and many ultra pricy solid state amps.