Frihed89
1000+ Head-Fier
A year ago I attended my first Rocky Mountain Audio Fest (RMAF 2006). At some point, I wandered into the SinglePower room, not knowing a thing about their products. Mikhail plugged me into black box and after about 15 minutes I knew I had to have one of these. A month later, a brand new MPX3 SLAM SE model arrived at my flat and I have been enjoying it, ever since. This year, I attended RMAF 2007. One of the reasons I went there was to listen to Blue Circle’s new headphone amp, the SBH. I did and fifteen minutes later, I ordered one. It arrived at my flat about three weeks ago, and after letting it run for 100 or so hours, I started listening seriously. This is a brief report of what I hear from my SBH and, even more briefly, how it compares to my SP rig.
The SP cost me about $2100 and I have spent about $2000 on tubes for it. The SBH cost me about $1100 customized. No tubes.
Frihed's New SBH and System - a photoset on Flickr
As you can see from the pics, the SBH comes in two small boxes. The one on the left is the power supply. There is a long BC-supplied umbilical that pumps DC from it to the headamp on the right. There are more dials and switches on my SBH than on the standard unit, because I wanted to use my SBH as both a preamp and headamp. Furthermore, I wanted to be able to play both at the same time. On the left side (from left to right), you can see: (top row) a hi-low gain switch for the preamp and the preamp volume, (middle row) two muting switches for the two inputs and (bottom row), left and right channel gain, which are shared by both the headamp and the preamp. On the far right is the volume dial for the head amp, and just beneath it and to the left is the ¼” headphone jack. The Blue Circle actually lights up!
Don’t ask me too much about what’s inside either of the two boxes. I can only speculate. Generally, BC pays a lot of attention to the power supplies in its units. After listening to the SBH for a while, it is easy to hear the difference that an oversized transformer and more than 220,000 uF of filtering capacity makes in the music: the background is totally black and the silence between notes is deafening. It also has a switch on the back to lift the ground if you are experiencing ground loop hum (which I do not). The headamp and preamp sections are both solid state and the output stage is opamp based. You’ll have to talk with Gilbert Yeung at BC about the rest. On the back of this unit, there are two input jacks and two preamp outputs, all single ended.
Headphones and related equipment? I used AKG K-701s with a Moon Audio Black Dragon Cable. These are my favourite headphones and cables. Together, they are uncoloured, detailed, and as accurate a listening combo as I have ever heard. Both the SBH (and the SP) drive these headphones easily, even when using 6SN7GTs as outputs in the SP (the gain of the input does affect the volume ones hears on my SP unit). My source was an ARCAM CD 192-T. My interconnects from my source to my headamps are Audio Note AN-V and I use AN Lexus from my preamps to my power amps. From there, I run AN Lexus speaker cables to my Stirling Broadcast LS3/5A V2 speakers.
The first thing you hear through the headphones when you turn this unit on is…..nothing. Turn up the volume and the gain all the way and you still hear absolutely nothing. This is the quietest piece of equipment I own. The next thing I heard was Carla Bruni wetting her lips a moment before she started to sing “Lady Weeping at the Crossroads” on her album No Promises. Remember the days we used to rave when we could actually hear a guitarist’s fingers moving up and down the fret? The SBH takes that experience a step farther, the background is so dark. The next thing I noticed about the SBH was how immediate and close her sultry French voice sounded. What I like most about headphone listening is this sense of immediacy that you can’t get with speakers. With a good set of speakers you feel yourself sitting in the audience, listening to the music spread out in front of you on the stage. A good headphone rig puts you up on the stage right in the middle of the performance. The SBH put me in Carla Bruni’s lap, her voice mingling in my ear with each breath she took. The music, oh…it was lovely, soft, and clear, with the SBH bringing out every detail in her throaty presentation. The notes sounded like they were coming from the deep reaches of outer space.
So, what about the rest? Let’s start with the treble. Everyone wants open and extended treble. So, to test the prowess of the SBH in this department, I put on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to play the opening few bars, the part with the flatted 7th that made this piece so famous. The SBH passed this test with flying colours, with a high level of detail and clarity. There was no grain at all; no thickness (colouration) or sibilance in the oboe passage and the notes almost seemed to ride on the wind, away instead of ending sharply. And again, there was the fabulous feeling of being close to the music and all around the oboe there was darkness. Dryness? None. There was a sense of lightness in the treble, but none of that old fashioned SS dryness.
The mid-range of BC amplifiers and preamps is legendary. Reviewers of BC equipment almost always note that the treble they hear is “musical without being coloured”. The same goes for the SBH, but I also found the mid-range of the SBH to be somewhat anomalistic because it is not laid back all the time, as it was for example on Bruni’s sexy tunes. In fact it can be downright powerful, as it was with the opening song (and several others) by The National on their new album, Boxer. In fact, one of the best aspects of the SBH is that it can make Carla Bruni’s alto voice sound lusciously seductive, Matt Berninger’s baritone voice stark and sharp, and Eef Barzalay, well, nasal and “geeky”, his voice cracking in unsettling detail. And when it’s not doing vocal impersonations, the mid-range of the SBH is very clear, very detailed and has a lot of just plain PRAT, as evidenced by the way it captured the flow of the music in the piano parts of Rhapsody in Blue and the catchy rhythm of “Fallen Angel” by UK artist Daniel Mulhern on Pigeon Coup. I’m still humming it.
I am not much of a bass lover, which is to say that I don’t play music that features bass instruments, but almost everything I hear does have at least a bass guitar, or a bass fiddle, or a piano, and of course drums. Not being a bass-lover I am not sure I know what to listen for. So I went back to my youth.
When I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s, I used to sneak down to New York because you could drink when you were 16 (meaning when you had a fake ID that said you were 16). During one of those trips, in 1959, I got to hear the magic bass of Charlie Mingus in the Village, and I immediately went out and bought “the” album that made him famous. I played that record until it was unlistenable, it had so many scratches. Fifty or so years later (recently), I picked up a used CD version of Mingus Ah Um, and when I played the track, “Boogie Stop Shuffle”, which features Mingus on bass, it was almost, but not quite, just as I remembered it. The bass was tight. The notes were distinct, but I also thought that the SBH’s presentation lacked the “character” of the original presentation as I recalled it, or expected it.
What haven’t I talked about: dynamics and soundstaging! There are good reasons for this. I have never played any music on my SP rig or my SBH where the amp couldn’t keep up with the music. My musical tastes are just not that demanding. Also, I don’t believe headamps can create a soundstage. The most you can ask for is good channel separation – when it is on the source medium. The SBH provides that in spades and its quietness and transparency make that separation even more pronounced.
Now comes the comparative part. I want to keep this short, because I spent a very long time setting up my SP rig so that I could make a fair comparison to the SBH. By “fair comparison”, I mean one in which the two amps had roughly similar voices. That was harder than I thought because the SBH is not SLAM-sounding and it is also uncoloured, so I had to find a combination that was neither forward, nor too “tube-like”. I ended up using an Amperex pinch waist 7062 as the input tube with two Sylvania 6SN7W short bottles as outputs. This combination was very quiet, with low distortion. It was detailed, without being dry; it had great bass and an open and extended treble, but it still possessed a hint of the fabulous 6SN7 bloom. (The tubes in the pictures are different, by the way).
There were three small differences between my SP rig using this tube set up and the SBH. First, if you like the bloom of the 6SN7, the SBH does not have this. Instead, it brings a sense of intimacy to the music without coloration. Second, the SP had slightly better bass, in the sense that while both were about equally tight, the SP seemed to render a more accurate tonal representation of the timpani that portrays the hunters in the Overture to Peter and the Wolf, including the trailing off of the reverberation after the timpani was struck. Also, at the lower end of the piano, the SP was just a little bit more musically convincing then the SBH. I had to listen hard for this, but it can make a difference. Finally, the treble in the SBH sounded slightly more open and extended (and more natural) than the SP. In all other respects, the two head amps were equals before my ears, but my emotional vote goes to the SBH because I preferred the intimacy of its presentation to the bloom of the SP and because I am a treble and not a bass-lover.
Finally, I want to say a few words about the preamp section of the SBH. It works well! It’s neutral. It’s accurate. It’s musical, and it conveys the same sense of immediacy as does the headamp, and the gain is perfect. My two other preamps, my SP SLAM SE – which has a preamp out – and my McAlister PL-12 both had excessive gain with my Quicksilver Mini-Mites and my Rogue Atlas: I couldn’t get the volume knob past about 9 o’clock without wearing ear plugs. With the SBH, even in high gain and sitting six feet from my speakers (near field listening), the volume dial sat comfortably at 10-11 o’clock. With low gain, it was closer to 2PM. What this unit lacks as a preamp is “refinement”, but it’s plenty good as very low cost add-on to the SBH, and the bottom line is that I am very happy with it until my Blue Circle SBT arrives.
You want a conclusion? I am fabulously happy with both my SBH and my SP. The SP has more voices, depending on my mood and the music I want to listen to. And while the SBH has but a single voice, it does everything a headamp should do in a superbly musical fashion, but most of all it make me feel closer to the music while it is being created and it does this without any colouration, but with a great deal of detail and an almost totally black background. At the end of the day what I learned from my listening is, first, that the SBH is a real winner and, second, that these two amps can happily co-exist on my equipment rack because they compliment each other so well and are not, in any sense, substitutes.
The SP cost me about $2100 and I have spent about $2000 on tubes for it. The SBH cost me about $1100 customized. No tubes.
Frihed's New SBH and System - a photoset on Flickr
As you can see from the pics, the SBH comes in two small boxes. The one on the left is the power supply. There is a long BC-supplied umbilical that pumps DC from it to the headamp on the right. There are more dials and switches on my SBH than on the standard unit, because I wanted to use my SBH as both a preamp and headamp. Furthermore, I wanted to be able to play both at the same time. On the left side (from left to right), you can see: (top row) a hi-low gain switch for the preamp and the preamp volume, (middle row) two muting switches for the two inputs and (bottom row), left and right channel gain, which are shared by both the headamp and the preamp. On the far right is the volume dial for the head amp, and just beneath it and to the left is the ¼” headphone jack. The Blue Circle actually lights up!
Don’t ask me too much about what’s inside either of the two boxes. I can only speculate. Generally, BC pays a lot of attention to the power supplies in its units. After listening to the SBH for a while, it is easy to hear the difference that an oversized transformer and more than 220,000 uF of filtering capacity makes in the music: the background is totally black and the silence between notes is deafening. It also has a switch on the back to lift the ground if you are experiencing ground loop hum (which I do not). The headamp and preamp sections are both solid state and the output stage is opamp based. You’ll have to talk with Gilbert Yeung at BC about the rest. On the back of this unit, there are two input jacks and two preamp outputs, all single ended.
Headphones and related equipment? I used AKG K-701s with a Moon Audio Black Dragon Cable. These are my favourite headphones and cables. Together, they are uncoloured, detailed, and as accurate a listening combo as I have ever heard. Both the SBH (and the SP) drive these headphones easily, even when using 6SN7GTs as outputs in the SP (the gain of the input does affect the volume ones hears on my SP unit). My source was an ARCAM CD 192-T. My interconnects from my source to my headamps are Audio Note AN-V and I use AN Lexus from my preamps to my power amps. From there, I run AN Lexus speaker cables to my Stirling Broadcast LS3/5A V2 speakers.
The first thing you hear through the headphones when you turn this unit on is…..nothing. Turn up the volume and the gain all the way and you still hear absolutely nothing. This is the quietest piece of equipment I own. The next thing I heard was Carla Bruni wetting her lips a moment before she started to sing “Lady Weeping at the Crossroads” on her album No Promises. Remember the days we used to rave when we could actually hear a guitarist’s fingers moving up and down the fret? The SBH takes that experience a step farther, the background is so dark. The next thing I noticed about the SBH was how immediate and close her sultry French voice sounded. What I like most about headphone listening is this sense of immediacy that you can’t get with speakers. With a good set of speakers you feel yourself sitting in the audience, listening to the music spread out in front of you on the stage. A good headphone rig puts you up on the stage right in the middle of the performance. The SBH put me in Carla Bruni’s lap, her voice mingling in my ear with each breath she took. The music, oh…it was lovely, soft, and clear, with the SBH bringing out every detail in her throaty presentation. The notes sounded like they were coming from the deep reaches of outer space.
So, what about the rest? Let’s start with the treble. Everyone wants open and extended treble. So, to test the prowess of the SBH in this department, I put on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to play the opening few bars, the part with the flatted 7th that made this piece so famous. The SBH passed this test with flying colours, with a high level of detail and clarity. There was no grain at all; no thickness (colouration) or sibilance in the oboe passage and the notes almost seemed to ride on the wind, away instead of ending sharply. And again, there was the fabulous feeling of being close to the music and all around the oboe there was darkness. Dryness? None. There was a sense of lightness in the treble, but none of that old fashioned SS dryness.
The mid-range of BC amplifiers and preamps is legendary. Reviewers of BC equipment almost always note that the treble they hear is “musical without being coloured”. The same goes for the SBH, but I also found the mid-range of the SBH to be somewhat anomalistic because it is not laid back all the time, as it was for example on Bruni’s sexy tunes. In fact it can be downright powerful, as it was with the opening song (and several others) by The National on their new album, Boxer. In fact, one of the best aspects of the SBH is that it can make Carla Bruni’s alto voice sound lusciously seductive, Matt Berninger’s baritone voice stark and sharp, and Eef Barzalay, well, nasal and “geeky”, his voice cracking in unsettling detail. And when it’s not doing vocal impersonations, the mid-range of the SBH is very clear, very detailed and has a lot of just plain PRAT, as evidenced by the way it captured the flow of the music in the piano parts of Rhapsody in Blue and the catchy rhythm of “Fallen Angel” by UK artist Daniel Mulhern on Pigeon Coup. I’m still humming it.
I am not much of a bass lover, which is to say that I don’t play music that features bass instruments, but almost everything I hear does have at least a bass guitar, or a bass fiddle, or a piano, and of course drums. Not being a bass-lover I am not sure I know what to listen for. So I went back to my youth.
When I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s, I used to sneak down to New York because you could drink when you were 16 (meaning when you had a fake ID that said you were 16). During one of those trips, in 1959, I got to hear the magic bass of Charlie Mingus in the Village, and I immediately went out and bought “the” album that made him famous. I played that record until it was unlistenable, it had so many scratches. Fifty or so years later (recently), I picked up a used CD version of Mingus Ah Um, and when I played the track, “Boogie Stop Shuffle”, which features Mingus on bass, it was almost, but not quite, just as I remembered it. The bass was tight. The notes were distinct, but I also thought that the SBH’s presentation lacked the “character” of the original presentation as I recalled it, or expected it.
What haven’t I talked about: dynamics and soundstaging! There are good reasons for this. I have never played any music on my SP rig or my SBH where the amp couldn’t keep up with the music. My musical tastes are just not that demanding. Also, I don’t believe headamps can create a soundstage. The most you can ask for is good channel separation – when it is on the source medium. The SBH provides that in spades and its quietness and transparency make that separation even more pronounced.
Now comes the comparative part. I want to keep this short, because I spent a very long time setting up my SP rig so that I could make a fair comparison to the SBH. By “fair comparison”, I mean one in which the two amps had roughly similar voices. That was harder than I thought because the SBH is not SLAM-sounding and it is also uncoloured, so I had to find a combination that was neither forward, nor too “tube-like”. I ended up using an Amperex pinch waist 7062 as the input tube with two Sylvania 6SN7W short bottles as outputs. This combination was very quiet, with low distortion. It was detailed, without being dry; it had great bass and an open and extended treble, but it still possessed a hint of the fabulous 6SN7 bloom. (The tubes in the pictures are different, by the way).
There were three small differences between my SP rig using this tube set up and the SBH. First, if you like the bloom of the 6SN7, the SBH does not have this. Instead, it brings a sense of intimacy to the music without coloration. Second, the SP had slightly better bass, in the sense that while both were about equally tight, the SP seemed to render a more accurate tonal representation of the timpani that portrays the hunters in the Overture to Peter and the Wolf, including the trailing off of the reverberation after the timpani was struck. Also, at the lower end of the piano, the SP was just a little bit more musically convincing then the SBH. I had to listen hard for this, but it can make a difference. Finally, the treble in the SBH sounded slightly more open and extended (and more natural) than the SP. In all other respects, the two head amps were equals before my ears, but my emotional vote goes to the SBH because I preferred the intimacy of its presentation to the bloom of the SP and because I am a treble and not a bass-lover.
Finally, I want to say a few words about the preamp section of the SBH. It works well! It’s neutral. It’s accurate. It’s musical, and it conveys the same sense of immediacy as does the headamp, and the gain is perfect. My two other preamps, my SP SLAM SE – which has a preamp out – and my McAlister PL-12 both had excessive gain with my Quicksilver Mini-Mites and my Rogue Atlas: I couldn’t get the volume knob past about 9 o’clock without wearing ear plugs. With the SBH, even in high gain and sitting six feet from my speakers (near field listening), the volume dial sat comfortably at 10-11 o’clock. With low gain, it was closer to 2PM. What this unit lacks as a preamp is “refinement”, but it’s plenty good as very low cost add-on to the SBH, and the bottom line is that I am very happy with it until my Blue Circle SBT arrives.
You want a conclusion? I am fabulously happy with both my SBH and my SP. The SP has more voices, depending on my mood and the music I want to listen to. And while the SBH has but a single voice, it does everything a headamp should do in a superbly musical fashion, but most of all it make me feel closer to the music while it is being created and it does this without any colouration, but with a great deal of detail and an almost totally black background. At the end of the day what I learned from my listening is, first, that the SBH is a real winner and, second, that these two amps can happily co-exist on my equipment rack because they compliment each other so well and are not, in any sense, substitutes.
