Powerful dac/amps with quality sound for orthos. - Page 2

 

And does a nice job with LCD-2's. 

 

The guys at soundnews romania made a detailed review. 

 

another thumbs up for Burson HA-160D & LCD-2 :)

 

i do wonder how would the HA-160 & DA-160 compare to the HA-160D...

The Burson will be more of a lateral move than outright improvement.

The Lyr and Isabellina are tube amps too. The Isabellina, isn't a detail monster, but has a nice warm tone and I liked it with the LCD2r1. Consider Apex Arete and Peak (without the Volcano power supply for now.) The Apex stuff is fast, dynamic, and clear. The Arete is completely solid-state. I would tell you to consider Woo too, but you mentioned you didn't want big tubes sticking out.

some info for the Isabellina HPA 

http://redwineaudio.com/components/#tube_stage 

Edited by john57 - 9/12/11 at 4:23pm

 

Are you kidding? care to elaborate..im curious. 

Isabellina HPA is a hybrid with a tube driver and transistor output. It has a half-tube sound if that makes any sense. Great tone with impact and good bass control.

 

On the Burson: for some reason I thought you already had the Lyr (my bad). Burson, Lyr + good tubes, or dynalo (Headamp GS-1) are worth considering. I'm on the Apex Arete review list and I used to own the Peak. The Peak and the Arete (assuming it's 80% of the Peak) even without the Volcano P/S is just in another league - it's another jump. Add Volcano later on and you get another 1/2 level jump. I'm partial to hybrid or tube amps, so you'll find many others who feel the GS-1 is a stronger contender (neutral transparent solid-state that doesn't add anything that's not already there.)

 

Since there are no longer any such thing as brick-and-mortar stores, you may as well buy several amps from places with liberal return policies and return the one you don't like as much. It will be well worth the return shipping costs.

Edited by purrin - 9/12/11 at 8:17pm

Not a fan myself but ymmv.

Not a fan either.  

 

Anax only likes the Woo WA5 and the Eddie Current amps with transformers.

I also like resolution and transparency.  I'm a weird one when it comes to amps.    I still have a nice list of amps that need to be heard (Luxman, SPL, Apex, Cavalli, etc.).  Still haven't heard an OTL yet either.

My favorite Eddie Current amp doesn't have output transformers. The Zana Deux gets a nicely low output impedance from the 6C33C tubes. Their transformer-coupled amps are quite good, too, but the Zana is special because it is an OTL that drives low-impedance headphones well.

I'm not big on hybrids. Some are better than others, but quite a few are primarily solid state amps with a tube tacked on because everyone wants tube amps today.

The tipoff is when the list of acceptable tubes includes ones that are electrically incompatible. Some tubes can be swapped back and forth without changing the circuit, like the 12AX7 and the 5751. But amps that use multiple incompatible tubes have a switch, so the internal circuit changes for a different tube. You'll see this for amps that run the 2A3 and 45.

But if an amp claims to run multiple incompatible tubes without a switch, be careful. It means one of two things. First, it could mean that the amp has a sophisticated system that can detect a different tube, know what kind of tube it is, then automatically adjust itself. That's pretty unlikely. It'd be expensive and very complex - the kind of thing that would be bragged about in sales lit. It would be a real achievement since I don't know of any amp that does that.

On the other hand, the amp could be lighting up the filament (what makes a tube look like it is working) and then running multiple tubes just enough to pass a signal and add some tube flavor to the solid state amp. Like a tube buffer.

Why not just run the tube as it was intended? There's a good reason for this. Tubes want a high voltage power supply. They start around 100V, but many like power in the 250V-400V range. That requires an expensive power transformer and some good filtering, also expensive.

Solid state runs on low voltage, around 12V-24V. That's a lot cheaper to build right.

So instead of having two power supplies, which would make the amp a lot more expensive, they run the tubes and solid state off the low voltage supply. You can get away with this because most tubes run 6V or 12V on the filaments. (You can tell by the first number of the tube's name: a 6SN7 has a 6V filament and a 12SL7 has a 12V filament). So the low power supply will make the tube look like it is working.

Then the tube is run at something like 12V so it'll pass the signal and add some tube flavor. But that tube won't really be amplifying the signal since, like I said, most will want 250V+ to really amplify, and it's too expensive to add a power supply that will do that.

The end result is primarily a solid state amp with a touch of tube coloration. Not really a real tube amp. It'd be like putting a teaspoon of scotch into a pint of water and telling people that it is a glass of scotch. These amps would work just fine if you bypassed their tubes.

Though I should add that some hybrids are legitimate and done right. But unless you can tease out the real thing from mostly a glass of water, be careful.

My take is to either run pure tubes or pure solid state. With pure tubes, you get a proper high voltage supply - there's no way to fake it. (Well, some put a switching power supply into amps. Those are electrically noisy, cheap and generally verboten in audio. Look it up. Good gear will run a linear power supply.) And don't dump on solid state. Done right it sounds fantastic. And you know there aren't any games played with it.
Edited by Uncle Erik - 9/12/11 at 11:51pm

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