LSA Voyager GAN Amplifier

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. 

@stereo5 I modded my LSA Voyager because of my experience with the SONY SCD-1. There are a lot of reviews on the Vaccum State mods that I also did on the SONY. The SONY had great bones, a 60 pound SACD player with SONY's best efforts 20 years ago. It cost $5K then but likely $10K-$20K for a smaller company to do the same level of work. In short the mods transformed the unit from great (lot of reviews on this unmodded player) to one that I will never sell, a masterpiece. Even today it is still one of my best digital sources. It is much better than stock and actually some stock features are removed or disabled.

Since you guys are all talking about musicians I will add that a musician who recently heard my SONY wanted to buy it. He could not believe how good it was with SACD's. He owns a lot of DACs and other gear.

So mods are not something I will dismiss because you can buy something better for more money.

I am not dismissing mods but if the item is so great, why does it need to be modded, especially during the warranty period?  I had the SCD777ES which was the same as the SCD1 without the balanced output and potted transformer @$3500.00.  It’s now a boat anchor and could never compete with my Esoteric X3 SACD player.