Negatron
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2006
- Posts
- 422
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- 16
As I mentioned when I wrote my initial MKIII impressions as it was breaking in, I would post a follow up if I could get motivated. Well, listening to this amp after a thorough break in is certainly motivation to sing it's praise, but it is just too easy to sit back and listen and get nothing written. Getting lost within music can be rather narcotic at times.
I find the MKIII to be a good looking amp, being neither modern or 'retro', It has it's own identity. The construction is well thought out and the circuitry is very well executed in the design philosophy it follows. There is skillful use of modern components but no 'new' tricks, no revolutionary way to refine tube design. This amp follows the school of Herman Hosmer Scott rather than Avery Fisher.
The component count is minimal, the signal path straight forward and short. The design uses no trimming of wave form or corrective tricks. The output is Single Ended Push Pull, or SEPP. A design presented by Julius Futterman in 1954 and finally put into commercial production by Harvey Rosenberg.. OTL designs are neither inferior or superior to transformer coupling but are certainly more difficult to execute. Although if you have ever heard an NYAL Futterman through ESL's or Maggies it will be etched into your memory forever.
The heart of the amp, where the output starts, is a power supply consisting of an tordial transformer filtered by 3, 330uf 250v Nichicon low ESR caps in a c-r-c network. It is a very low impedance supply for a tube amp and allows for very well controlled low bass response. I might add that with all that capacitance, the amp is dead silent when it is turned on or off.
The bass response of the MKIII is quite more than I would expect from an headphone amp, it remains controlled well into the lowest registers. There is bass and then, there is bass that you are surprised by. Bass is reputed to be the domain of solid state amps and for tight, hard hitting bass that is sometimes the case. I'm using an pair of DT-770's lightly damped with BlueTac to evaluate bass response in my own designs or anything else. This amp surprised me after it broke in. Low bass is very impactful, yet does not mask any low level detail that is happening at the same time. You can readily pick apart each individual sound. That is an area where many amps struggle.
I can't stress break-in enough, before the amp has fully settled in, say around 100 hours, you will be impressed with the midrange, typical good tube. Glorious, liquid, detailed. it is invisible in the way it wraps itself around you. You tend to overlook the edge on the lower mids, the loss of control in the bass that will be there before it settles in. The highs are a bit edgy and the very top can be hard as well, before the amp gets it's stride. But smooth out the top does. And it does it very well indeed, inner detail is present the further in you listen. It can be like Ansel Adams photography, not the prints in books but the actual prints, for those of you lucky enough to have seen any of them. There are shadows within shadows, and within those shadows are yet more shadows with greater detail. It's spooky.
The illusion of 3 dimensional space or soundstage is presented in a well broken in MKIII with tight spatial detail. When you pin point an instrument it stays there, it does not wander as it will with many amps. I'm not quite used to the finite dimensions of Head-fi yet but am thrilled with the lack of having to deal with a listening room.
The stage has width wider than the instruments and the ambiance decays as it should. The depth is not as deep as I would expect, but it falls back well behind the front of the presentation. The height has a ceiling, I have the feeling when listening to live music and acoustical instruments that I am in a club with a low ceiling but all the ambiance of the recording is there. If the recording was made in a club with a 12 foot ceiling the ambiance is presented as such. It's hard to explain, but it is intimate.
You can feel the layers within the harmony, the layers separated by air and you can hear the pressure variance as fingers squeak across strings of guitar. You can hear the amps used in the music, which ones are rolled off, which distort too hard. Kick drum attack is very defined, you can easily tell when the skin is tighter and catch the more resonant but shorter decay when a bit stretched at the end of a set. You are listening not just to the individual instruments but how they are tuned. It's Fun.
The ability of the amp to present very low level detail is as good as I have heard from a majority I have listened to. The silence is that, silence. Not that great a trick, but it appears that quietest whisper can be heard behind the music if it was recorded to begin with. I attribute this to the amps minimalist amplifier design. It resolves very well. It will not fix a source that is bad, or make a recording that was poorly mixed with second rate gear sound good because this is a tube amp. It is not euphonic, it is very revealing.
It's hard to evaluate things like this. It is way too easy to get pulled into the music and just take a mental vacation for awhile. This is the kind of gear that has a habit of just going away. I'm not reminded from time to time that I am listening to an amp, it is just me and the music. When the disc is over I pop another one in by rote and keep on being detached. I like electronics that don't intrude.
Do not mistake my enthusiasm, the amp is not perfect, and there is room for improvement, but the company had to meet a price point and this is what makes this amp shine. The choice made with components used and how they ended up voiced is exceptional. There is a synergy between mid-priced components used in the amp that bring out nuance in the music that you would not expect in an amp in this price range. Do I lust after Some of Ray Samuals upper teir stuff? You bet I do. Mikhails? Oh yeh. But am I happy with this amplifier? In a word yes. It's a keeper.
For those interested, the sources for my comments have been an California Audio Labs Delta transport and Sigma DAC, Heart 5000 Tube CD player, which is based on the Marantz 5000, a Theta Cobalt DAC, a LiTe DAC AH modded passive out.
The two SS DACS are used to keep me from becoming too tube biased.
(Are 8 paralelled 1543's, passive output a non state, rather than solid state?)
CD's used for notes taking were:
Chris Rea, The Road to Hell
The Knotting Hillbillies, Missing (Knopfler & friends)
Dire Straits, Love Over Gold
Enya, Shepard Moons
Tangerine Dream, Poland
Phones used were K-501's, modded DT-770's & borrowed Senn 600's
I find the MKIII to be a good looking amp, being neither modern or 'retro', It has it's own identity. The construction is well thought out and the circuitry is very well executed in the design philosophy it follows. There is skillful use of modern components but no 'new' tricks, no revolutionary way to refine tube design. This amp follows the school of Herman Hosmer Scott rather than Avery Fisher.
The component count is minimal, the signal path straight forward and short. The design uses no trimming of wave form or corrective tricks. The output is Single Ended Push Pull, or SEPP. A design presented by Julius Futterman in 1954 and finally put into commercial production by Harvey Rosenberg.. OTL designs are neither inferior or superior to transformer coupling but are certainly more difficult to execute. Although if you have ever heard an NYAL Futterman through ESL's or Maggies it will be etched into your memory forever.
The heart of the amp, where the output starts, is a power supply consisting of an tordial transformer filtered by 3, 330uf 250v Nichicon low ESR caps in a c-r-c network. It is a very low impedance supply for a tube amp and allows for very well controlled low bass response. I might add that with all that capacitance, the amp is dead silent when it is turned on or off.
The bass response of the MKIII is quite more than I would expect from an headphone amp, it remains controlled well into the lowest registers. There is bass and then, there is bass that you are surprised by. Bass is reputed to be the domain of solid state amps and for tight, hard hitting bass that is sometimes the case. I'm using an pair of DT-770's lightly damped with BlueTac to evaluate bass response in my own designs or anything else. This amp surprised me after it broke in. Low bass is very impactful, yet does not mask any low level detail that is happening at the same time. You can readily pick apart each individual sound. That is an area where many amps struggle.
I can't stress break-in enough, before the amp has fully settled in, say around 100 hours, you will be impressed with the midrange, typical good tube. Glorious, liquid, detailed. it is invisible in the way it wraps itself around you. You tend to overlook the edge on the lower mids, the loss of control in the bass that will be there before it settles in. The highs are a bit edgy and the very top can be hard as well, before the amp gets it's stride. But smooth out the top does. And it does it very well indeed, inner detail is present the further in you listen. It can be like Ansel Adams photography, not the prints in books but the actual prints, for those of you lucky enough to have seen any of them. There are shadows within shadows, and within those shadows are yet more shadows with greater detail. It's spooky.
The illusion of 3 dimensional space or soundstage is presented in a well broken in MKIII with tight spatial detail. When you pin point an instrument it stays there, it does not wander as it will with many amps. I'm not quite used to the finite dimensions of Head-fi yet but am thrilled with the lack of having to deal with a listening room.
The stage has width wider than the instruments and the ambiance decays as it should. The depth is not as deep as I would expect, but it falls back well behind the front of the presentation. The height has a ceiling, I have the feeling when listening to live music and acoustical instruments that I am in a club with a low ceiling but all the ambiance of the recording is there. If the recording was made in a club with a 12 foot ceiling the ambiance is presented as such. It's hard to explain, but it is intimate.
You can feel the layers within the harmony, the layers separated by air and you can hear the pressure variance as fingers squeak across strings of guitar. You can hear the amps used in the music, which ones are rolled off, which distort too hard. Kick drum attack is very defined, you can easily tell when the skin is tighter and catch the more resonant but shorter decay when a bit stretched at the end of a set. You are listening not just to the individual instruments but how they are tuned. It's Fun.
The ability of the amp to present very low level detail is as good as I have heard from a majority I have listened to. The silence is that, silence. Not that great a trick, but it appears that quietest whisper can be heard behind the music if it was recorded to begin with. I attribute this to the amps minimalist amplifier design. It resolves very well. It will not fix a source that is bad, or make a recording that was poorly mixed with second rate gear sound good because this is a tube amp. It is not euphonic, it is very revealing.
It's hard to evaluate things like this. It is way too easy to get pulled into the music and just take a mental vacation for awhile. This is the kind of gear that has a habit of just going away. I'm not reminded from time to time that I am listening to an amp, it is just me and the music. When the disc is over I pop another one in by rote and keep on being detached. I like electronics that don't intrude.
Do not mistake my enthusiasm, the amp is not perfect, and there is room for improvement, but the company had to meet a price point and this is what makes this amp shine. The choice made with components used and how they ended up voiced is exceptional. There is a synergy between mid-priced components used in the amp that bring out nuance in the music that you would not expect in an amp in this price range. Do I lust after Some of Ray Samuals upper teir stuff? You bet I do. Mikhails? Oh yeh. But am I happy with this amplifier? In a word yes. It's a keeper.
For those interested, the sources for my comments have been an California Audio Labs Delta transport and Sigma DAC, Heart 5000 Tube CD player, which is based on the Marantz 5000, a Theta Cobalt DAC, a LiTe DAC AH modded passive out.
The two SS DACS are used to keep me from becoming too tube biased.
CD's used for notes taking were:
Chris Rea, The Road to Hell
The Knotting Hillbillies, Missing (Knopfler & friends)
Dire Straits, Love Over Gold
Enya, Shepard Moons
Tangerine Dream, Poland
Phones used were K-501's, modded DT-770's & borrowed Senn 600's
