teknorob23
Member of the Trade: Network Acoustics
I used the serene kte with May and utopia for a long time as it was my favourite amp for utopia by some distance. Resolution, speed dynamics and tonal clarity were the best I’ve heard. The serene obvs has less power but listening around 70db I had the volume at around a third. I have switched to Diana TCs which are as hard ti run as the susvaras and at the moment I run them out of my 2 channel speaker outs. I’m only interested in the bliss for dtc and if I didn’t need the juice I would stick with serene as it’s the best preamp I’ve heard even compared to amps cost £15k+. I will definitely be keeping it on preamp duties.Also something that I'm interested in: When used in May -> Bliss -> Utopia, can one get the volume low enough? With SparkoS Aries my only complaint has been that even the lowest volume setting is quite loud in this chain. I'm using HQPlayer so it's not a complete deal killer, but digital volume control just doesn't feel the right way at this level.
For the record the serene was far more resolving than the ferrum stack, pass labs and benchmark. The volume is a work of art. I would be very surprised if the bliss doesn’t deliver similar level of performance just with more power.
Proof of course will be in the hearing, so hopefully not too long to wait to find out.