Joule Electra LA-450ME
Category: Preamps
The Joule Electra LA-450ME is in my home! I'm really glad that I made such great a decision to change the preamp, lucky me.
After 2 weeks of burning-in, the sound has changed mostly in the lower register, becoming “softer” and “inside” the music. I have used the expression “softer” only because with the new unit it was hard and sharp on the edges, not vibrant, thus hard to determine the instrument playing. Mids and highs were not changed that much, but altogether everything has become impressive, emotional, natural, real and also magical.
The main point is that music is now the key of the system!
The JE LA-450ME replaced VTL 7.5 and I cannot say that the VTL was doing anything wrong, but the JE is just more powerful and natural, in fact everything moved toward real in terms of dynamic, timbre ie natural reach sound. It is difficult to explain the feeling and emotions over the usual technical reports and reviews. Here I would rather talk about playing as it simply is not possible to divide sound on our audiophile terms. The feeling is the same as when listening to live performance, where you are not able to say anything about the technical point of sound. High frequencies simply disappeared and joined the mids where they add micro-dynamic and natural timbre. Same happened with low frequencies adding to mids powerful deep sound. OK heights and lows did not really disappear when needed, but are so much more natural - hard to believe.
Whatever I’m going to listen to, I always find music in front of everything. Some good recordings, and I have some that are excellent, unique samples recorded by a friend that are not compressed and mixed: Sabir Mateen, Trewor Wats, Chad Taylor, The Necks and many other – they are to be heard! All these pieces are so powerful, so real, that I find myself starting to believe that the impossible is possible. So, whatever is recorded you will hear, but always in a very natural way.
The other day I listened to live diatonic button accordion, the instrument with the soul, and shortly after that on my system, where I found the same soul sound, except that live dynamic.
The rest of my system is Magneplanar MG 20.1 speakers and Spectron Musician III Mk II fully upgraded monobloks. MG owners know how hard is to bring to life planar speakers, so Spectrons are first steps and JE showed to me how much of sound is still inside MGs. All this experience led me to think of adding a second pair of Spectrons, and to convert passive speakers to active. Such an approach would bring the whole system to its ultimate where that missing hint of dynamic, to recognize this sound as real, will be surly added.
