OPT question: AirTight w/ Tamura vs Marant 8B

Interesting question. I know Mr. Mura, the designer of Air Tight products. His amps are excellent and the output transformers are very good as well. They are beautifully built and do sound very good. Before he died I got a chance to spend an hour on the phone with Sid Smith a few years before his death. I have a soft spot in my heart for the Marantz 8. I have fixed them and love bench testing them. I asked him about his transformer design and about how he settled for the one he used in the 8B. He told me, for prototyping purposes, he himself built 45-50 different iterations of the output transformer. He potted them himself and listened to each and every one before he decided on the one he used. He was a bit upset because he was not consulted for the commemorative version. Designing output transformers is very much an art form unto itself. He never wrote anything down. I asked if he would, because with his knowledge it would be a shame to loose all that knowledge if God forbid something happened to him. He said I don't care, when I go, it goes with me. I can tell you that his output transformers are amazing. I've never seen better square waves come out of an amp as I see with the 8B. Some manufacturers cheat by designing the transformer to ring a bit at high frequencies making you think it has wider bandwidth, but it doesn't. That ringing is non-linear and is therefore not useable frequency response. Marantz 8B transformers really don't ring at high frequencies so all that high frequency bandwidth is useable. A remarkable man, and a remarkable transformer.

Thanks very much Hifigeek1. You make me appreciate my 8B.

Jim

I have owned four air tight amps, they are the best made products I have ever used, I think they walk all over the marantz, which in my opinion has value as a nostalgia piece. Hope I didnt insult anyone.

I think this comes down to a vanilla and chocolate kind of thing. Neither amplifier is right or wrong; both should offer tremendous sound and pride of ownership.

Let's admit the Tamura transformers surely rank among the best in current production. Along the lines of Hifigeek1's incredible telling of Sid Smith's development of the Marantz iron, I don't think it implausible to give the 8B the advantage, and that's no slight on the Tamuras. Build quality of both look great, let's call that a wash.

Personally, I think it comes down not to transformers, but passive parts. These obviously reflect their respective era of manufacture. Capacitors have come a long way, so consider that a slam dunk for the Air Tight. You might think the resistors would be just as clear cut. True, modern metal film resistors do offer much closer tolerance, stay at their intended resistance over a wide range of temperature, and offer that highly resolving sound of today's high-end audio. But I'll go against the grain of today, and say that a good many audiophiles would appreciate the thick, full-bodied sound carbon composition resistors produce.

In the end, you win bigtime with either amplifier

..and carbon comp. resistors tend to be a lot more noisy, i.e. thermal noise. There is no such thing as the right or wrong amplifier. It's not that black and white. Each person hears differently, their audio system is different, and their listening environment is different. That's what makes the world go round.