Wow! Smiling here. Thank you so much Albert for sharing your knowledge and experiences. Your thoroughness to describe the details is of great value here. And I did have to smile with "DESTROYED". I have read many great things about the Steelhead so it would be interesting to learn what the Io does so significantly over the Steelhead....at least in the context of your system or your friend's system.
What does concern me here is that there appears to be much maintenance with the Io...all of its tubes, the necessity to change to NOS tubes to really have it play to the level you describe and that it still needs a line stage with most speakers to sound its best. I'm not sure all of these potential reliability/maintainability issues are worth the effort if only subtle improvements exist. But if it truly does "DESTROY" the Steelhead, then it might be worth it. Only one way to know and that is to hear these for myself. Your writings here have given me quite the itch to hear these very much.
Something here keeps telling me NO line stage has got to be "better" than using a line stage. So this too is something I will need to try. If the Io alone is incapable of driving an amp and speakers the same (dynamic) way as the Callisto, this sounds like a change/tweak needed to the Io. It just seems a bit odd to need another active stage to get things "right" if the output level is otherwise capable of taking the amp to full power.
Concerning those big ARC amps, I had to smile of this too. I have gone through many ARC amps over the years, the Classic 60, then the VT130 (oh such magical mids) and then back to the Classic 150s. And then I tried this little lowly Counterpoint NPS400 stereo amp with the basic Michael Elliot mod. This absolutely DESTROYED the huge ARC triode mono amps. Talk about a surprise I was unprepared for. The world of high-end audio always has a new surprise if we keep an open mind.
And thank you Jfrech for your comments on the P10SE. I like the BAT sound very much but somehow I get the feeling there is another level of phono enjoyment to be had with these other phono stages. Now if only I had a way to do a shootout with all of these!
Thank you again very much to all who contributed here.
What does concern me here is that there appears to be much maintenance with the Io...all of its tubes, the necessity to change to NOS tubes to really have it play to the level you describe and that it still needs a line stage with most speakers to sound its best. I'm not sure all of these potential reliability/maintainability issues are worth the effort if only subtle improvements exist. But if it truly does "DESTROY" the Steelhead, then it might be worth it. Only one way to know and that is to hear these for myself. Your writings here have given me quite the itch to hear these very much.
Something here keeps telling me NO line stage has got to be "better" than using a line stage. So this too is something I will need to try. If the Io alone is incapable of driving an amp and speakers the same (dynamic) way as the Callisto, this sounds like a change/tweak needed to the Io. It just seems a bit odd to need another active stage to get things "right" if the output level is otherwise capable of taking the amp to full power.
Concerning those big ARC amps, I had to smile of this too. I have gone through many ARC amps over the years, the Classic 60, then the VT130 (oh such magical mids) and then back to the Classic 150s. And then I tried this little lowly Counterpoint NPS400 stereo amp with the basic Michael Elliot mod. This absolutely DESTROYED the huge ARC triode mono amps. Talk about a surprise I was unprepared for. The world of high-end audio always has a new surprise if we keep an open mind.
And thank you Jfrech for your comments on the P10SE. I like the BAT sound very much but somehow I get the feeling there is another level of phono enjoyment to be had with these other phono stages. Now if only I had a way to do a shootout with all of these!
Thank you again very much to all who contributed here.
