Antique Sound Labs

No, Dennis Had was in no way involved with Antique Sound Labs. He built the Inspire amps.

Link to: Antique Sound Labs

Thanks for the responses, but I'm mostly curious about whether the brand still survives, and how they are viewed by this community.  The other thread was about some dealer apparently bashing all Chinese tube amps.  ASL came to mind as a fairly early Chinese maker with a good reputation at the time.  Has anyone had any experience with them in the last 10 years?

I recently got in touch with Divergent Technologies in Canada who was the North American distributor of ASL for a schematic of one of their headphone amps. 

I asked what had happened to Antique Sound Labs and was told:

ASL IMO has decided to change course and pursue more profitable businesses Rick.

Make of that what you will...

My very good friend has a pair of these Wave 8 Antique Sound Labs mono amps. I borrowed them for 10+ years or so to use in my office. I used these with an Adcom 555 Mk II preamp with a Sumo Delilah crossover into a pair of Kef C10 cabinets (with a small sub). A modest system that I used to playback signals from various PC’s and a ProJect turntable in a very small office environment.

The build quality was decent considering the price point.  Each amp chassis was quite compact with a power switch on the front of the amp. 1 RCA input with the power socket on the rear. More power than you’d expect. While warm sounding and reasonably neutral, I didn’t think they were overly accurate or revealing, though the mid-fi stuff I was using them with wasn’t exactly top shelf components either.

It was fun to have them around, I was thankful to be allowed to use them and I believe my good friend still has them (sitting on a shelf unused). I would not seek out my own pair based on my listening experience.

Hope this is helpful.

The ASL SET 2A3 Tulip amp had a nice review in Listener back in the 90's.