Okay, some initial thoughts on the sound after a few hours listening. The amp has around 90 hours burn-in on it. Source is FLAC files played in Foobar with bit-perfect optical out via an Onkyo PCI 200 series card into a C.E.C. DA53 DAC. The DAC is set to x1 oversampling (i.e. none), soft digital filtering, dither on and 128FS. Might need to experiment for that as it is set up for my AT-HA5000 that has been my main amp for a few years. Connection via my own silver wire and solver solder built phono cables and jacks that I forget the name of (bought in Akiba with the amp). 'Phones are Sennheiser HD 495s. I will try out some AT-W5000s later, but at the moment I'm not using them much because they are incompatible with wearing glasses IMHO so they are waiting for some contact lenses or laser surgery...
First impressions are very good. I threw some modern stuff at it to see how well it would cope with the ridiculous loudness levels and as expected it coped well. The tubes do an amazing job of making fairly crap recordings sound good, and the amp seems to synergize with the '495s brilliantly. The bass in particular is fantastic, full with a good amount of slam but also musical. Seriously, we are talking about the kind of thing you get from the HA5000/W5000 combo, excellent separation and a kind of effortless power. Guitars sound realistic with that lovely tube-amp ringing (is that the right word?) that is easily lost in the "wall of sound" that seems to be popular.
The soundstage could be bigger but you never have trouble picking instruments out. I'm having trouble describing it, the separation is less than my HEADFIVE but in a way that makes the sound "fuller" and without hiding the detailed sounds that lesser amps lose. It does make me want to crank the volume a bit. The top end is a bit flat, somewhat expected with vacuum tubes, and the effect is rather enjoyable. You don't get the sparkle or the extreme detail of a high end solid state amp, but with some music that isn't necessarily a bad thing. For serious listening the ATs are hard to beat but when you just want to enjoy the music and relax this amp seems ideal.
The '495s are only 32 ohms but I tried the high impedance output anyway and felt it lacked clarity. The amp looks lovely and keeps my room warm too :-)
