LSA Voyager GAN Amplifier

Tube gear can sound bright and brilliant or dull and warm. Cannot paint the sound of all tube gear with a broad brush as you have. Ralph’s tube gear does not sound like you think in your mind. Unless you have owned his amps? I have owned his pieces. They are brilliant and as lite up from within as the recording may or may not deliver.
Also, you hear your very own violin differently than other humans. Some hear different tonality in your violin playing as this is part of being human and unique. So you are not hearing it more correctly than another. When we better understand the subjective part of our individual ear/brain differences and preferences, then perhaps we will stop taking sides and keeping score.

I am starting to learn this after 40 years of being an Aphile and music lover.

I could not even stay in the same room that Benchmark gear was powering. My ears and preferences drove me out while others were completely and utterly immersed in the music.

Perhaps it would improve the signal to noise ratio if those with commercial interests in their recommendations either mention such in their posts or not be allowed to post in non-commercial forums.

I have huge respect for your technical expertise, but sorry, if you are not a violinist or any other trained classical instrumentalist you may not realize that close exposure to real instruments teaches that these natural sounds are BRIGHT (in the good natural sense, not for example in the artificial types of distortion that is obvious if you tune the radio slightly off its freq and get the static which brightens the sound).

@viber6  I agree! I've been playing instruments since I was three years old (piano); started harpsichord when I was in 6th grade. I picked up string bass in 7th grade and played in orchestras and ensembles well after college. These days I'm in a rock band playing keyboards again only now they are synths and a Mellotron. But I also play flute and have 2 albums of that; used to regularly play out until the pandemic.


The brightness I'm referring to isn't the correct natural brightness of instruments; its caused by higher ordered harmonic distortion generated by all electronics. Your radio tuning example is a great way to illustrate how this works. The ear interprets all harmonic information as a tonality (this is how we can tell the difference between wound and gut strings for example). Traditional solid state amps and tube amps with feedback sound bright because the distortion I'm referring to isn't masked, so the ear interprets it as brightness- quite independently of the instruments being portrayed in the recording being played back. This is why two amps can measure perfectly flat on the test bench but one will be bright while the other is not. Put another way, this kind of brightness is not a frequency response error.

I suspect the words "bright and brilliant" can easily be equated to harsh and sibilant....so I think it would be worthwhile for those of you that actually play instruments to spill a little more ink explaining what you mean.

When I hear unamplified instruments being played up close (I don't play), I think of what I'm hearing in terms of present, dynamic and powerful...and almost always at a level that I've never heard on a home audio system.

“The LSA amp is so good, I can’t wait to get it modded”. That tells me it isn’t that good because if it was, why void your warranty to make it better? I would never mod anything.  If I got the itch, I would buy something better and I certainly wouldn’t mod a brand new piece of equipment.  I will stick with my big and heavy Mac amp, it sounds great and have no desire to ever mod it.