Fidelity vs. Musicality...........Is there a tug of War?

Peter says in response to Karsten -

"I really wish that I shared this experience. Do you think my AHB2 may be a duff specimen? Surely not - these are mass produced and should all sound identical. If you’ve read my original posting "REVIEW - Benchmark AHB2 with Avantgarde" you’ll see that my experience is hugely different from yours. I’m inclined to turn down the volume or move on to the next track and am certainly not on the edge of my seat - and I’m not a tube enthusiast!

Why are we hearing things so differently? Either my AHB2 is a duff, or my tube amps are much better than any you’ve had in your system..."

Yes, it does make me wonder, too, especially when this is Karsten’s response (in part, its very long and jazz hands clapping) to Peter -

’..Listen to a string quartet on most tube amplifiers and it will sound big, blooming and embellished, or listen to it on most solid state amps and it will sound opaque and "twisted".’

Well, I'm glad we cleared that up.

"I took the AHB2 along with me for a weekend at our country place, in Connecticut, to see if it would be as successful with my more modest system there. That’s where I discovered that my new hero amp wasn’t quite perfect. Oh, its power and resolution were still not to be faulted, but through a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 8 speakers, the sound was somewhat hard and thin. Could it have had something to do with the Silver 8s themselves?

....

Familiar recordings of women’s voices, such as Marianne Beate Kielland singing Finzi’s "Come Away, Death" .. and Sara K.’s cover of "Can’t Stand the Rain" from her Hell or High Water.., sounded strange. Both voices were higher, not in pitch but in tonal range, as if they’d been transformed from mezzo-sopranos (which Kielland is) to sopranos. Again, I would describe it as a loss of warmth and resonance in the fundamentals of their voices. Unfortunately for the AHB2, this loss pervaded the sound of whatever recording I played. I wrote it off as an example of an amp-speaker mismatch."

- Kalman Rubinson

Yep, probably the speakers, despite John Atkinson's assurance that they should be fine. Again, I’m glad that’s all clear as mud.

Kal posts on ASR why not go ask him what he thinks since he uses  AHB2 in his system. Who knows might have been the speakers after all.

The Benchmark is a fine amp, and it hovers nearer the clean/sterile sound, some would say "white" sound as opposed to colored. It will not bring gobs of warmth as some prefer. This is all on a spectrum of characteristics, so opinions will vary, and that makes such discussion difficult.  Now, class D amps such as the Legacy Audio i.V4 Ultra have more warmth than the Benchmark and more resolution. See my reviews of these products at Dagogo.com. 

It's not the speakers. It's easy to characterize an amp when you use it in, say, 8-10 systems with five or six speaker genres, but if you only use it in one or two you have less understanding of the amp's character. However, different genres of speakers will influence how strong the character of the amp is expressed. Anyone who uses it in one rig and claims they know the sound only has a general idea regarding its character.