Top ten tube amps

I can already see red in this thread.

Might i back up my choices of having audio note and blue circle at the top of the list by describing the sound of a few of the other amps in my list which are lower down but none the less good. Jadis is very musical but some colouration takes a way from the whole picture (JA80's). Canary CA339, refined good at most things but not particularly musical or emotionally involving as my top two. Music reference fast and a little lean tonally, again not quite making that step into musciality, but excellent in all other areas. I could go on, but the reason behind my top selections is because of the emotional connection as well as the hifi aspects. I think if people are going to make recommendations then a word or two about each one might also be helpful. There will be those who simply enjoy their equimwnt becasue of their ability to recreate good soundstaging or deatil, while others will be happy with the whole musical picture of the event that is taking place. I do not mean Naim route where pace and rhythm are taken to an extreme at the cost of all else, to the point where you can be left exasperated by their energy.

Audiojoy4- I have not had the pleasure of hearing Audionote or Blue Cirlce outside of a show, so I cannot comment on your rankings, but as for your endorsement of them as "emotionally involving". IMO, that is the THE criteria for gear selection. IOW, if the music you are hearing does not "touch you" , then the gear is not working, for you, in your system. Writing and performing is an art and as with any art, it is in the emotional reaction that the artist communicates with the observer/viewer/listener. A great artist can do that over an AM car radio. So frequency extension, imaging, soundstage, etc don't matter if the resultant sound that you hear is does not touch you. Remember, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!
Happy holidays.

Swampwalker that is in my opinion the sad thing about the hifi retail world. There are so many manufacturers trying to get into the act that there is too much stuff for all dealers to stock. Even more unfortunate is that in my opinion the majority of these companies have designers who do not have a musical ear or indeed have never even played an instrument and work on the hifi aspects of the sound only. If you look at magazines over the years, up until the last one or two years reviewers have been fascinated by trying to get you to recreate the illusion, but totally ignored the emotional aspect of the music.I belive that this is at the heart of many enthusiasts needing to constantly change equipment. If they were connecting with the music at the emotional level then the hifi would matter less and analysis of the soundstaging or detailing would not be the concern. Instead of listening to bits of albums I bet you would be more likely to sit and listen to the whole lp without stopping to analyse the sound or change to an LP which might satisfy your need for realism for those few moments. I know I went through these stages in the same way reviewers are too now discovering what hifi should have always been about in the first place. This is why some of the older classic hifi sounds so good, Garrard, Rogers Leak etc etc, they started off building equipment sounding natural in the midrange and which emotionally connected. We some how all lost our way after that. Now more and more manufactures are beginning to under stand the concept of a 'musical' sounding system.

I wonder if the manufacturers and reviewers always new that but if they kept the musicality out of the equipment and aimed at getting you to just recreat amazing deatail and dynamics then you would always get bored quickly and want to move onto the next equipment. Interesting, were they clever enough to have conceved this in the same way that we have been fooled about Hydrogen cars as still being a new concept in development 20 years after the first working modwel was made, so that we would all continue to buy petrol?????????

>Music reference fast and a little lean tonally, again not quite making that step into musciality,<

Audiojoy4,

Sounds like you are referring to the RM-200, and I would agree. That was my take on it too. The RM-9 in either iteration is a different beast altogether.

Oz

Audiojoy - You are right about the high end missing the point about musicality. I came to this conclusion at last year's CES/THE show, where the vast majority of systems, regardless of price, had an excess of upper midrange energy and a lack of mid-upper bass energy.

The mention of a car radio is interesting, as I had an experiencethat bears this out. The BSO was featuring a deaf percussionist (Evelyn Glennie) one week a few years back. I heard / read good things about her, so I went. My seat was so bad, I didn't really enjoy the performance. I later bought the CD, and thought, unusual, but not great. I then heard her perform the same piece with the Detroit (or was it Minneapolis) symphony on NPR Radio, ov er the factory stock torn-up paper speakers in my 83 Ford Fairmont, and was spellbound. Somehow, the orchestra and Ms. Glennie just hit it off together, and their ability to make music came through even on a terrible system, and was more enjoyable than the OK performance on the CD played over a high-end system. I've wondered if the lack of enjoyment at Symphony Hall was really due to my bad seat, or if somehow, they just weren't pulling it together musically. The sound at Symphony Hall was certainly better, even from my seat above the right side of the stage.