Well, I haven't had as much free time this weekend as I was hoping for, but I did listen quite a bit yesterday morning, and I can give you some impressions so far.
The first thing is the amp is dead quiet. On my amp, I mounted the connectors for the heaters on the underside of the board, so the heater wiring is far from all of the other wiring. The casework is not ready, so actually the whole thing is currently only mounted on plywood, with the star grounds only connected to the ground wire on the ac input terminal block. Even with this temporary setup, it is dead quiet.
As far as the boards go wrt heat dissipation, the power supply doesn't produce much heat at all. The amp heatsinks are also only warm - far from hot. The biggest source of heat that I am noticing is from the tube heaters to tell the truth.
This is my first time listening to stats, and the whole listening experience is so different than dynamics that I'm not sure I'm the right person to judge the amp, but here's what I notice so far.
The amp appears to have a great deal of speed with precise control. I started out with a few albums I know well, and what was apparent was the reproduction of echo and reverb is very realistic sounding. One album was David Crosby's
If Only I Could Remember My Name, which was recorded at Wally Heider's. This studio had a very unique sound, and this amp does an amazing job of reproducing the subtleties of their echo chamber which to me points towards precision of the amp to keep each channel tightly in phase with the groove of the album. Anyway, not sure if that's true, but that's how it feels.
The amp has tons of low end, which is great as well. I love bass guitar, and the amps really shines here. It's not hit you over the head bass power, instead its again very precise which means you can actually hear what the player is doing. It seems too that this presence and control is also there at low listening levels, which seems different than dynamics. I notice I can get all of the bass I want without the urge to turn up the volume.
Beyond this, then things probably begin to become headphone dependent, and again the SR-404LE's are my first and only stats. My first impressions there is that the soundstage seems smaller as compared to my Beyer's, which is taking some adjustment in listening. Vocals are amazing on the 404's. I'm also thinking I like acoustic music better than electric on the stats, but I need to do more listening before I can judge. Let me rephrase that, it may end up being that I like listening to rock on dynamics better than stats, but like I said, I'll need more time to listen before I decide.
Overall, I'm really impressed with this setup. I'm listening to Pavement's release
Crooked Rain right now, and it sounds great. The reproduction of the harmonics coming from Malkmus' jazzmaster is simply amazing...
Thanks again Alex!
