The Antique Sound Lab 1001 (or is it 1003?) 30 watt Class A integrated. And it has something few others have:continousness, where it sounds like the live mike feed from the Met and not like typical, the-string-section's-here-one-minute-and-gone-the-next sound. cj has the same quality in their components (I assume it's that Teflon capacitor that seems to bring everything to life), but I've tried a few others and they sounded "cleaner" but certainly not "alive" as in the Met mike feed on Saturday afternoon. We tried the Cayin integrated and it was cleaner than the ASL, but more like a live performance??? Not what we'd call a close call...
We're not so much for the better bass, better high components anymore. As Jon Valin has written in TAS, many of these have the frequencies right: they just don't make it sound "real" and these days we'd rather have 88.8% of the frequencies and have it sound live-not-Memorex than 100% and just "Memorex."
We're not so much for the better bass, better high components anymore. As Jon Valin has written in TAS, many of these have the frequencies right: they just don't make it sound "real" and these days we'd rather have 88.8% of the frequencies and have it sound live-not-Memorex than 100% and just "Memorex."