300b lovers

Alexberger,

You are sure right about that.  I have Don Sachs new preamp and his shoebox 300b monos and swapped out my Cube Audio Jazzon speakers for a pair of updated AR 2ax speakers and they sound extremely musical.  A great front end yields benefits no matter what speakers you have.  Rest assured, the Cubes will be back in my system shortly.  

Yes, I've come to the conclusion that speakers and power amps are about 50/50 responsible for overall sonics. Based on measurements, you'd think that speakers are responsible for 90% of system coloration, but in practice, no. The amps have a big role, too.

I agree that the amp plays a very big role in the sound, and perhaps, too little attention is paid to the amp.  Far too many pick their speakers first, and then think finding the suitable amount of power will be the primary task in picking an amp.

I got into the amp game after auditioning both the Audio Note Ongaku and the Reichert Silver 300B on speakers of my own design. I’ve been designing speakers since 1975, so I have a pretty good idea what goes in them and why they sound the way they do. Crossover design errors, diffraction artifacts, enclosure resonances, driver breakup, etc. are things I usually hear in a few seconds when I listen to commercial speakers. So I know speakers pretty well.

What surprised me was the Ongaku and Reichert revealed things about my speakers I did not know were there. And different things between the two: the Ongaku revealed "space between the notes" in a way I had never heard before, as well as extraordinary, almost uncanny spatial realism. The Reichert deepened the emotional response to the music in a way that was outside the audiophile experience and not anything to with coloration or tonal balance. It was just a feeling, even when I was listening objectively and trying to assess what I was hearing. It just snuck up on me with a powerful emotional response.

It’s one thing listening to a commercial speaker that’s off-the-shelf with unknown design goals, semi-custom drivers, and unknown crossover design, but quite another when the speaker is something you’ve taken from initial conception to successive versions to final prototype. You’ve pretty much heard everything it can do, and have already built 13 different crossover variations and auditioned it on eight different amplifiers. You know that speaker inside and out.

And yet my speakers had undiscovered sonic aspects that were NOT part of source impedance (damping factor) or audible amplifier coloration. Things I’d never heard before. What kind of "distortion" gives MORE resolution, or a deeper, more profound emotional response? That’s nuts. Nonlinearity is not our friend; it steals resolution and separates you from the music with a haze of coloration.

So what’s going on here? That’s when I started researching the history of vacuum tubes and started writing for different audio magazines. I don’t believe in copying or "cloning" the designs of others; not only is it dishonest, it reflects a lack of understanding on why a product sounds the way it does. You have to understand the "why" before you can go any further, and that took about five years before I came up with the Amity in 1997.

Amplifiers are not as neutral as we would like them to be, and an amplifier with measured distortion in the parts-per-million range is not necessarily neutral sounding. They all have a sound ... Class D, GanFET, bipolar transistor, pentode, triode, and direct-heated triode.

A local store builds and sells their own high end tube gear and their own horn-based speakers.  For most of their demonstrations of the better horn systems they use their 350B amplifier.  One day when the boss was away, two of the younger employees spent the afternoon swapping in speakers acquired in trade-ins to see how they sound.  While all the speaker sounded quite different, they all sounded amazingly good to these two.  They could not believe how good even Polk speakers sounded.  It then dawned on them that the amplifier mattered a lot.  One did not get that kind of "transformation" of the speaker with the likes of Conrad Johnson amps, for example.  That is not to say that the CJ isn't good, it is just that the 350B amp had a particular character to its sound and that character played well with a wide range of speakers.

I tend to find that tubes related to the 350B do sound nice with a wide range of gear.  I tend to like 6L6 and KT 66 tubes (similar to 350B).  I run a somewhat similar, albeit much less powerful tube, the 349 (in pushpull) and I like it a lot.