Alot. But in ways that don't make it obvious that there is anything wrong with the Audiopax amps. To the contrary. With the right tube complement, and adjustments to the timbre lock feature, the Audiopax amps are incredibly lively, musical and present a lovely, involving midrange. Jim Smith even advocated what amounts to a cheap guitar tube for the small sockets to make it sound a little rawer/edgier, compared with NOS hi-line brands. He also did not advocate using expensive KT-88s. Now, I had the Audiopax set up with long speaker runs, and the Lamms are running on a long interconnect (XLR terminated from the Lamm line stage to the amps) with short speaker runs. I also changed brands of interconnect, from Cardas Golden Reference, which was highly recommended for the Audiopax-Avantgarde Duo combination, to the K-S Emotion. So there were some variables in the change of amps.
The Lamms, by comparison, sounded a little less in your face, and far less mechanical. Not that I noticed the Audiopax amps being anything less than sweet and musical, but the Lamms suddenly sound very relaxed, music just flows out of the system in a far less 'reproduced' way, and the bass is much better (even though I am not really using the Lamms to power the woofers directly, but instead, the amp powers the midrange horn, which has a set of KS jumpers to 'speaker input' terminals on the powered woofer). The Lamms are less hi-fi and more musical in ways that can best be described by the absence of artificiality if that makes any sense. I find these abstract descriptions to be difficult but if you heard the amps, and had the opportunity to compare them, you would probably not disagree. One thing I have noticed as I have continued to improve this system- records that were not sonic marvels before are more involving to listen to now. Go figure.... (and thanks for asking).
