300b lovers

@whitestix 

He clearly knows the sonic splendor of 300b gear.  

Sonic splendor is true. 300b SET mono blocks owned since 2009 and as happy with them as I’ve ever been. Listening to the great jazz guitarist Barney Kessel as I write. Reading the comments from Lynn and Don on the how and why of their PP 300b amplifier convinces me your description of its sound is dead on the mark. I have no doubt that it is sublime.

Charles

I rather think that there is inherent magic in the employment of 300b tubes, which I discovered with my Willsenton 300b amp with all of 8 wpc.  It drove my Spatial just fine... until it didn't.  With these monos, there is no such limitation on db levels vs distortion which stands to reason.  Easily end-game amplification which will be added to with Don's new preamp, designed from the get-go to pair optimally with the monos via XLR connections. 

You have great 300b amps, and you like Barney Kessel (I am almost solely a jazz listener for 50 years) so you and I are on the same sheet of music.  Your posts are always informative and upbeat, which I value.   

Whitestix I can tell you are astute and have a sense of humor.  When I came up with that name in 2002 I was thinking of my family name and probably at that point didn't realize ss is an abbreviation for solid state amps.  Funny :^)

I too have been almost exclusively a jazz listener since junior HS in 1964.  Listening to Joe Pass, the Compete Pacific Jazz Years right now.

I hope to meet you at PAF

What’s odd is that I have trouble describing the sound of my own gear ... this applies to Shadow Vector, my loudspeakers, and my electronics. I aim for natural, open sound that is free of electronic artifacts. If there is a residue of coloration, I’d like it to be pleasing, but as low as possible.

That’s the goal. What I hear is a very spacious sound, no surprise there, but also an unexpected "trippy" kind of feeling that slowly deepens over the first ten to twenty minutes of relaxed, non-critical listening. I have no idea what causes it, to be honest. Many don’t experience this, but some do, and it’s fun to watch them process the experience. My only guess is the disjunction between the auditory experience and the visual experience is so strong that secondary emotions are invoked.

My degree is in Psychology with a focus on Perceptual Psychology. I grew up in Japan and Hong Kong, which gave me a cultural experience different than most Americans, and am a bit familiar with Buddhist, Taoist, and Vedanta Hindu world-views. Partly as a result of that, I take Western audiophile pronouncements about what can, or can’t, be perceived with a lot of skepticism. Different cultures experience the world in profoundly different ways, and there’s a lot of individual variation, too.

The task of the audio system is to get out of the way of what can be a profound emotional experience for the listener. "Accuracy" in this context is absurd, since the goal is to facilitate a trance experience, a dreamlike state of consciousness. Artificiality (colorations that do not occur in nature) is distracting and can prevent the experience from happening.

By minimizing coloration at the level where it originates, the device itself, there’s less need for post-facto processing, which can induce dynamic colorations that are unnatural and a signature of "electronic" sound.

This discussion is kind of "meta", but it is my experience audio designers need to have a goal they are aiming for, otherwise you will never get there. And not a mechanistic goal, but a perceptually subjective goal.

I forgot to ask, will the new amp also take 2a3?  The LINLAI 2a3 apparently sound better than Elrog 300b, so high praise indeed.