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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: The remarkable moments in Audio.
Post Subject: The most astonishing amplifier ever.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 12/21/2017
I was promising to tell stories of my audio miracles with no
order of chronology or importance, so here is another one. I think it was in
2002-2003. I was transitioning from Lamm amplifications to Melquiades and was contemplating
to introduce a DHT to Milq midrange. I
think I posted at my site somewhere an invitation however locally has “interesting”
Direct Heated SET amplifier then bring it to my place as I would like to compare
it to Milq’s MF DSET. A few folks contacted and a few amps were heard. One of
them I still consider was a miracle and there was the most interesting amp I
ever heard.
I do not know the guy who brought it, I never seen or heard
from him again. He came to my place and brought his Japanese made amp. It was 3
stager, all tubes are DHT, with tube rectification. It was all with vintage carbon
resistors and kind of semi-amateurishly built. He said that it was built by
order and it costed him $32K. I think it was Shindo amp but I might be mistaken
now. As I used his amp to drive my MF driver I did not see any big difference
between Milq and that amp. So, it was a wasted evaluation in my view. I did not
have appropriate full range speaker to drive. Remember, Macondo were multi-channel
and therefore I decided to compare my visitor’s amp with Milq driving Macondo Injection
Channel at full power. I got rid the Injection
Channel’s high-pass crossover, EQed the volumes and let the amps to show themselves
off. Milq was for sure more full-range amplifier but the visitor amp showed something
that I never seen before or after and something that up to now I believe was one
of the most remarkable moment in audio I experienced.
That amp re-maped time between musical events. It is like
hearing a very good pianist plays music that you very much know but the pianist
is taking his notes a few milliseconds before or after the time to take the notes.
It was so shocking and so out of anything that I ever heard that I was not even
ready for this. The only thing that I felt was that I was waiting physically for
the each note the amp make and the amp did it in his own time. The stunning effect
that the amp’s music had on me was that the sound of that amp gave absolutely new
level of curiosity to music, as I was always waiting what (or most accurately
would be saying “when) a new note will come out of this amp. It was absolutely devilish
hypnotizing fun to listening the amplifier. I have absolutely no idea how the
amp did it but the memory of that amp’s sound very much live in my mind as a uncontestable
pinnacle of what might be done in audio.Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site