Atma-Sphere S-30 MK3

Mission,
Based on your obvious unfamilarity with the line it's highly doubtful you could hear the difference between a stock unit and one that is highly optioned.

There's very little to learn in a dealer audition when the system contains none of your components, cables, and room acoustics.

I suggest your comments are those of an inexperienced listener.

Mission, I think the upgrade path is prefereable to having three models to choose from and having to sell my unit to move up the line. It seems more cost effective to be able to buy what you can afford today, and move up the chain as money allows. The product is more than "worthy" in basic form, but allows even better performance down the road - I think this approach makes a lot of sense as a owner/user.

I suppose I should clarify a few things, after some emails I got regarding this thread.

With regard to options: Being audiophiles ourselves, and inveterate tinkers, we know the temptation to look under the hood and see what can be hopped up. That's the sum total of why the option packages exist- we've tried all sorts of tweaks in the amps and preamps over the years and we include them if they have been shown to have merit, unless the tweak compromises reliability. So it comes down to the resistors and capacitors- we figured out which ones work, and those are the options. To date we've not found an example of someone using a different part that outperformed them.

All our products are built with a custom copper wire that is as pure as anything else out there- by rights, we could be cable company :)

With regards to the S-30: Two things need to be considered, actually with any of our amps:

first, they are very revealing (transparent). Please, before deciding that the amp/preamp is at fault (and especially if you use digital as your only source), try a different source! I find that poor digital electronics have glare artifacts to this day and is still one of the reasons I prefer analog. OTOH a good digital system can be listened to all day, but what is a good system and what will have glare is not all that predictable- certainly price has nothing to do with it... and often what others say about it or what your own experience has been with a less transparent amp/preamp could well be irrelevant. I don't mean to insult anyone, this is just my experience over the years (FWIW, overall the amps lack a reputation for glare amongst our customers- that phenomena is always symptomatic of one of these two issues I bringing up here).

Second: Duke and others are quite right: the amp/speaker interface is **crucial** (see http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html
for why. Please note that the paper is not talking specifically about our products, although they do fall into one of the two categories discussed. The S-30 is one of the smaller OTLs made and runs very little feedback (a simple way to increase the feedback is to run the unit single ended, without the shorting jumper in the XLR connector; if the amp seems to sound better, then the impedance curve of the speaker is an issue- and can well be solved by use of a set of ZEROs.), consequently it is 'load sensitive' in the same way some of Nelson Pass' 'current source' amplifiers are. If the 'glare' is at a certain frequency (for example at the crossover), a simple Zobel network can be devised to correct the matter. The S-30 is a special case in that it makes more power at higher impedances, this causes some modern speaker crossovers to not work in the way that the speaker designer intended if they are used to Voltage Paradigm rules!

Transparency to the source is a two-edge sword. When it's good, it doesn't get better, but when it's not so good....

Ralph,
Very informative, as always.
When you said:
"All our products are built with a custom copper wire that is as pure as anything else out there- by rights, we could be cable company ",
I wonder, if you have found silver-plated copper wire to sound different (read glare), than pure copper. That has been my personal experience.