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Amp shootout.....Tenor 75wi verses Berning ZH270

in a recent thread there was much discusion of the above 2 amps, whether the Berning was indeed an OTL, and which one might be better.

i have no opinion as to whether the Berning is an OTL. but today a Berning ZH270 owner brought his amp over to compare to my pair of Tenor 75wi's. my system is OTL friendly, with easy to drive speakers, so the Berning's acknowledged advantage in driving difficult loads was neutralized.

these amps have very similar power, the Tenor is 75 watts into 8 ohms, the Berning is 70 watts into 8 ohms. otherwise it is not really a fair comparison....the Tenors are $19900 a pair, the Berning $4500, the Tenors weigh 70 pounds each, the Berning weighs about 10 pounds.....it seems like Goliath verses David. the result is somewhat closer than that.

we played three different discs and each of 3 people listened to their disc in the sweetspot. the Berning owner felt that the Tenor had a more dimentional sound, deeper soundstage but felt the Berning was equal in bass extension and detail retreival. the independent listener felt the Berning was excellent for the money but not in the league of the Tenor in any paramter. my perception was similar to the independent listner; that the Berning, at $4500, is amazing in it's top to bottom excellence, dynamics and musicality.....but....does not do things like the Tenor. the sense of space, detail in the soundstage, texture and microdynamics of the Tenor are at a whole different level.....and they better be for $15000 more.

like the Berning owners, i am a shameless Tenor lover and consider the Tenors better than any other amp i have heard at any price, assuming a reasonably easy load to drive.

the Berning is more like a $8k to $10k amplifier.....and Berning owners should be justifiably proud of their amps.

i did think the Berning had slightly more bass slam than the Tenor, but with much less bass articulation and extension than the Tenor.

we spent the rest of the enjoyable afternoon listening to some great vinyl......an enjoyable time had by all.
mikelavigne
oneprof
147 posts
 
Alan, just out of curiousity, did you compare the prototype monoblock Bernings to a pair of strapped 270's? Power output would be about the same. Maybe that couldn't be done because of other design considerations. I ask because I am toying with the idea of getting another Berning and strapping them. I seem to remember seeing a comment in a post a while ago to the effect that strapping a pair of 270's resulted in sigificant improvment in the sound over a single 270, (maybe that's a foregone conclusion).
We need an OTL (definitional issues aside) convention!

John
mes
393 posts
 
Mr Kamm/Kwann-Thank you for your most excellent posts. It's always helpful to have the ludicrous and obtuse juxtaposed to cogency for contrast.
allanbhaganinfo
121 posts
 
John.The 270's are easily strapped into Mono, some Berning customers do this now, it's however only necessary if you have a speaker that needs more power, there seems to be no degradation running the 270 mono but I would not think it would better a single 270 other than in control of power hungry speakers.

Some who have heard both say that the Monos I have, show some trait of two 270's strapped.

Hopefully somewhere this summer, we can really listen to all these togehter.
allanbhaganinfo
121 posts
 
How about this guys, since Tenor is in Canada, there is the Montreal show next year, March.
How about we all met in that wonderful city and have a blind test with Bernings, Tenors, Lamms and who ever wants to bring what.
Maybe a type of club an ask the manufacturers to participate.
What do you think?
If you can afford Lamms and Tenors, you certainly can afford to fly to Montreal, it's a great show and a beautiful city.
It's the poor Bernings guys that will have to take the bus :)
asa
662 posts
 
To be honest, you guys need to swap out the Linn IC and NOS-tube the Berning, which I think remains fair given the price disparity.

Although the CD12 is wonderful - for CD - Linn is quite biased component-to-component towards dynamics and detail at the expense of rear hall depth and liquidity (a house bias). In my experience, albeit limited, with the Berning, it also tends towards detail and "accuracy" if not fed right upstream. Given that the Karma's ceramic drivers can also load towards detail, the IC issue becomes even more critical, especially when we concede that our own experiences show us that the wrong IC -and particularly one designed by a manufacturer who designes its IC's as part of a system without the need for versatility from sysetm to system - can make all the difference in the world.

With that said, I thought the Berning was a nice amp at $4500, but did not consider it world class.

Nice thread though and thank you for your efforts.
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