Cary 805s or Atma Sphere M60s?

The Cary's are a high-calorie sweet dessert with a focused sound stage. They do lose air around the instruments with more complex pieces of music. They are great for listening to jazz, vocals, acoustics, and the like. The Atma Sphere has a very broad spectrum sound stage, with a velvety black background, contrasted with timbre and detail with strings, chimes, and other types of percussion. Bass also has color, texture and warmth along with visceral punch I have never experienced before. Music is absolutely "real sounding" The instruments and vocals become life-size even with the small listening dimensions I am limited too. I am tempted to sell the Cary's however both have attributes I enjoy. In the end however, the Atma Sphere is the amplifier I prefer; clean, realistic with the soul of tubes.

Glad you had a chance to try the Atma-sphere OTL and come to your own conclusion, we all hear differently and seek different things from the sound of our equipment, in both cases it seems we might be on the same page. Which is not to say I would not also love the Cary, simply have not tried it.

In my case, I prefer the Atma-Sphere's speed and intimacy. I can hardly imagine anything that could touch the M-60's at their price point. I compared the exceptional BEL 1001 MkV's, 220 Watt solid state monoblocks which I would also pick over the Cary by a slim margin.

There's a nice pair of Atma-Sphere M-60 3.1's with every available upgrade (the Caddock resistors are very expensive and worthwhile) available on AudiogoN now.