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On the Odeon horn system. I had been using it in my downstairs Ref 3a system with quite a bit of success. It has a rich but well resolved sound and is punchy and tight in the bass. With the Ref 3as it goes reasonably deep and with surprisingly good control and nice texture. A really great budget amp and not a budget sound at all. Not as resolving or refined as the JJ but really not too far off either.
So, analog on the big rig with a little amp. Not a problem of course with 98db/watt. I have found a strong preference for the amp in triode mode. Pretty much everything improves. So, it is a Class A, 18 watt, push/pull amp in triode mode and uses two 6550s per channel. It is tube rectified and choke filtered as well, not common in a budget product.
The analog rig is the Yamaha GT-2000 (outboard PS and vacuum accessories) with AT150MLX cart into a Silvaweld SWH650 phonostage then direct into the Puresound A30. I fired up my copy of Katchachurian violin concert on EMI with Itzahk Perlman as the soloist. I have been loving this recording because the soloist is captured so well. The woodwinds are also very well represented and it allow timbre and tonality to be evaluated without much effort.
The Puresound A30 is dynamite in this setup where the amp is not asked to work very hard even at pretty loud levels. Dyanmics, macro and micro, are explosive and imaging and soundstaging are 1st rate and 3 dimensional . Tonal balance is slightly warm but not cloying and serves to enhance subtle tonal changes as instruments do when going from soft to loud. This was particularly true for the soloist and the background woodwinds. String basses have nice texture and decent power. The only place one might realize a bit of budget to the sound is in the massed strings, which never sound bad but are a bit homogenized and, well massed. Still, it is hard to believe one can get such good sound for such an affordable price (I paid about 700 euro for the amp).
I then fired up the big NAT and it handles the big dynamics better, resolves the strings better has a bit more power on the bottom end (but curiously a bit less in the upper bass range). Low level resolution is only slightly better but the A30 was really good there anyway. Tonality is slightly cooler and perhaps not capturing the "volume" of the instruments as well. It is a bit further set back. Overall, the NAT sounds more composed when things get busy (as it should when you see the back breaking size of the power supply) and more resolving at all levels but it doesn't have this 3d projection thing down as good as the other tube amps in my stable (the JJ is a champ at this). Given the price differential (the NAT was 11K euro new) it is an amazing feat by the A30 to hang so close in most areas.
As a final test for the evening I took the Puresound L10 preamp and ran that in between the phonostage and the A30. That had the effect of making the dynamic climaxes better resolved and even better focus. Most else was about the same, indicating that the L10 doesn't do too much editorialization of the sound.
It was a short set of demos but instructive about what can be found out there for reasonable money that delivers great sound.
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Topic - Been giving the PureSound A30 a spin - morricab 12:29:15 05/10/15 (2)
- BP psu. - jusbe 00:07:26 05/11/15 (1)
- RE: BP psu. - morricab 05:31:15 05/18/15 (0)
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