paradoxper
Headphoneus Supremus
That particular issue pertains to the electrostatic side of design fault.
To be honest, Woo is an irrelevant brand to me so I'm ignorant to potential issues with their dynamic amplifiers.
Trafomatic Primavera Initial Impressions
- Thread starter Pale Rider
- Start date
To be honest, Woo is an irrelevant brand to me so I'm ignorant to potential issues with their dynamic amplifiers.
Shahrose
Headphoneus Supremus
This is an overview and preliminary review of my recently purchased Trafomatic Primavera headphone amp. I bought it myself, and I have not been asked for this review, nor promised any form of reward or benefit for it. I have no relationship with Trafomatic or Audio Prana other than as a customer.
1. Ordering process & Delivery. Well, unless you’ve seen/heard one at an audio show, you’re pretty much ordering it blind, and with almost no reviews to guide you. Fred Crane at Audio Prana in Gloucester, MA is the distributor/dealer for North America. And if you live in the US, that’s who you order from. Fred’s a great guy, giving freely of his time to answer any questions about the Trafomatic product line. One of the things that Fred shared is that Trafomatic has only built Primavera amps for customers, and has not supplied any to the trade press. So much for in-depth reviews. And they build about 6 per year.
Trafomatic will finish the amp in just about any RAL color, and can finish it either gloss or with Soft-Touch, a rubbery-like coating. I believe 6moons mentioned this coating in their review of the Lara preamp. The coating is quite cool, and adds to the tactile enjoyment of the amp. Although I had originally set my sights on a sort of Pearl Oyster White color, Trafomatic happened to have enough of the matte black rubber coating material in stock to offer It to me at very little additional charge, but with some additional wait time. I accepted that offer.
It’s not cheap. But when you look at some of the other TOTL statement headphone amps from people like MSB, and Viva, you can see that the Primavera is price-competitive in that class. And I happen to know that there are folks out there pairing $50k+ amps with the SR1a and Susvara.
Color and finish are the only choices. Everything else is stock. Pay your deposit, and settle in for the wait, which can be anywhere from 8-16 weeks. I ordered mine in late February, and it shipped from Serbia early April. When it finally arrived in Massachusetts, Fred turned it around immediately and shipped it overnight to me in California.
It arrives in a big wooden crate, which grossed out at 44.91kg or 99 pounds. My FedEx delivery guy asked for help with it.
2. Build Quality. The Primavera is beautiful, especially if you like tube amps. The fit, finish, construction and weight, are very much what one would expect from a $15k amp.The layout is very much in the style of the deep, slightly narrow, SET look like Decware and so many others. It is built like the proverbial tank. As noted above, it is available in just about any color you could want.
3. The Setup. The signal chain is NAS—>Cisco Switch via fiber—>Roon Nucleus+—>MSB Select II w/ Network Renderer 2—>Trafomatic Primavera. ICs are Iconoclast. Power cords are Cerious Graphene. The MSB has a Gigafoil 4 and .5m BJC Cat 6 Ethernet in front of it. The Nucleus+, GigaFoil, and Cisco are powered by a Keces P8 [I share this for info only, not to start a cable/power supply/network discussion].
The Susvara specs are:
Frequency Response : 6Hz-75kHz
Impedance : 60Ω
Sensitivity : 83dB
Weight : 450g (15.9oz)
It’s that 83db sensitivity that seems to be the challenge for most amps. Obviously, any amp capable of driving insensitive speakers would probably do just fine; pretty much all speaker amps and a few headphone amps. Say, something like a Schiit Vidar, which I initially used to drive my SR1a, would be fine. And it is fine. I tried it out one day on the Susvara, ad it didn’t sound half bad. I also own a HeadAmp GS-X Mk2 and an LTA Z10E. Both do quite fine by the Susvara, the Z10E to my ears slightly better than the HeadAmp, and at 2.5x in cost, one might hope so.
4. Initial Listening Impressions. I purchased the Primavera primarily for use with the Susvara. I also listened to my LCD-4, the MySphere 3.2, and the Focal Utopia. IIRC, a fellow Head-Fier opined that the Primavera would not be a good match for the Susvara due to a perceived impedance mismatch. I think this may have been speculative. Inasmuch as the Sus was one of the headphones used to voice the Primavera’s development, that strikes me as an odd speculation, but to each their own. There is no impedance mismatch I can discern. The Trafomatic does not have a 60Ω setting, but it’s 50Ω setting is more than close enough. In the well-done owner’s manual. the user is cautioned that an impedance higher than a headphone’s rated impedance will likely cause distortion [it does], while one lower than the headphone’s rating should be fine [it is].
The tracks I listened to repeatedly [there were many more, but these I made into an evaluation-specific playlist]:
Chris Rea, The Road To Hell, The Road To Hell 1 & 2 Cowboy Junkies Trinity Revisited Blue Moon Revisited Nirvana Nirvana The Man Who Sold The World Manu Katché Unstatic Unstatic GoGo Penguin V2.0 Murmuration Mark Knopfler Shangri-La Boom, Like That Dead Can Dance Into The Labyrinth Yulunga Fiona Joy Hawkins Into The Mist Opus 1-3 Yo Yo Ma Vivaldi’s Cello Cello Concerto in C minor Robert Shaw & ASO Verdi Requiem Dies Irae Ozzy Osbourne Ozzmosis Perry Mason Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio Midnight Sugar Midnight Sugar Massive Attack Mezzanine Teardrops Propellerheads Decksanddrumsandrockandroll Take California Dire Straits Brothers In Arms One World Getz/Gilberto Getz/Gilberto The Girl From Ipanema Boz Scaggs Dig Thanks To You Dire Straits Brothers In Arms Brothers In Arms Linkin Park Meteora Breaking The Habit Rush Moving Pictures Tom Sawyer Jim Keltner Sheffield Drum & Track Disc Amuseum Steely Dan Aja Josie Supertramp Crime of the Century School Black Dub Black Dub Surely The AIX All Star Band Moonlight Acoustica Moonlight Acoustica Pink Floyd A Momentary Lapse of Reason Sorrow Eddie Money Playlist Take Me Home Tonight Dead Can Dance Labyrinth The Wind That Shakes the Barley Fazil Say Complete Beethoven Sonatas Sonata No. 14 [Moonlight] Peter Gabriel So Mercy Street
Here’s the TLDR version: the Primavera makes the Susvara. It makes it as good as, maybe better than the Stax SR-009S in all but the most minute and intimate of detail, and on female vocal, percussion, and piano transients. In the ability to disambiguate layers, it is on par with the Stax/T2 combo. From a PRAT, slam, presence, and richness perspective, it exceeds the RAAL | Requisite SR1a, though it is audibly inferior to the SR1a in detail and speed, transient attack and decay. So is everything else.
5. Specific SQ Topics.
a.It’s really tough to beat the Stax SR-009S/T2 combo on piano and female vocals. As wonderful as the SR1a is, it sometimes feels like the speed takes precedence over the fullness. Depending on the recording location—e.g., a church vs. a studio, the size of the hall, etc.—and how much “air” one desires around one’s ears, one can easily find the SR1a and the Stax a tossup. But if one wants to really hear and feel the orchestra during something magnificent like Verdi’s Requiem, neither the SR1a nor the 009/S can deliver what the Primavera/Susvara can. This is also true of smaller scale stuff, like GoGo Penguin’s Murmuration, which has some visceral bass lines in the build up to its climax. The Stax and RAAL simply cannot do what the Susvara does with the Trafomatic. Similarly, the Cowboy Junkies’ Blue Moon Revisited reveals some significant differences between the cans. There are wonderful bass lines in this track, that the Sus reproduces better than the other two cans. But there is also soundstage, air, and transients that both the SR1a and Stax reproduce slightly more realistically. [Note: I apply some EQ in Roon to the SR1a when listening, to bring the bass up a touch, but it’s still no match for the Sus. and sometimes the Stax.]
b.I mentioned disambiguating layers above. Take a recording from the old Phil Spector wall of sound era, or a more modern equivalent like Eddie Money’s Take Me Home Tonight, or almost any massed symphonic/choral work like the Requiem or Beethoven’s 9th. The Susvara will separate and reveal the various layers upon layers that such recordings deliver [either as a bit of a gimmick in the Spector case, or more naturally in a symphonic hall]. On my HeadAmp and Z10E, those layers are more “congested” on the Susvara, and thus quite a bit less desirable than the TOTL amps for the Stax and the RAAL. But that changes with the Trafomatic. Like peeling and reassembling all the layers of an onion, or some Tony Stark virtual 3D design holography, both the whole and the parts become audible.The Susvara is not quite as fast as the Stax, or the SR1a, but its presentation of the fuller audio spectrum provides proper weight, and thus imaging and location, to those instruments that produce the bass lines. Cymbal crashes may be slightly thicker, but the tympanis nearby are more realistic.
c.For some people, electrostats can be a bit zingy. I think that is usually a shortcoming in the amplification, but maybe not all of it. A good planar should have none of that, and very nearly all the speed of the electrostat. The Susvara does. I found myself replaying some tracks like Blue Moon Revisited and Murmuration over and over again, just to delight in the balanced combo of speed and top-to-bottom SQ.
d.I apologize to anyone who is offended by this, but the LCD-4 is just not in the discussion. Whether on the Primavera or the HeadAmp or the Z10E, it comes across as too warm even dark, veiled, and thick. I had not listened to my LCD-4 in quite some time; I was startled at how poorly it compared to the other cans. On bass, it thumped all the others but the Susvara, but that’s not enough to carry the day. Granted, I am a bit of a speed and detail freak, but compared to the other three cans, the LCD-4 sounded veiled and a bit sluggish.
6. Conclusion. Although I have been without my SR1a for a couple fo weeks while the HSA-1a is having some updates fitted, I have little doubt that it will return to being my favorite overall listening kit, because of its amazing transient speed, air, and soundstage, while the Susvara/Primavera will be my 1a listening choice. But I could be wrong. We’ll see. That slam is awfully addictive. I don’t love my T2/009S combo any less, but its use case has been narrowed. If I want air, speed, the sense of shimmer, and a little more comfort as compared to the SR1a, I will listen to the Stax. But for overall top-to-bottom SQ, the Susvara/Primavera is my new #1.
This is the type of stuff I'd pay to read. Thank you for the excellent review.
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I take back what I said lol
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JonathanKlein
Head-Fier
Because you've A/B/Y'd with the other two? Suuuuuure
MaggotBrain
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When I put my fingers to the keyboard to describe my impressions of the Trafomatic Primavera Headphone Amplifier, for some reasons my thoughts centered around the Athenian philosopher Plato. Plato was famous for his descriptions of the ideal - that he had never seen a perfect circle or a perfectly straight line but he had an idea of what those should be and await to be discovered. And if we transferred Plato some twenty four hundred years into the future, placed a headphone on his formidable noggin and engaged in a Socratic dialogue about the ideal tube headphone amplifier - he would likely picture the Trafomatic Primavera amp.
The Trafomatic Primavera is a Serbian designed hand-built high end tube amplifier that retails for $15,000 from Audio Prana in the US. I was drawn to a potential end-game amp given the nature of gear I possessed already but the real world ramifications of shipping such a beast thousands of miles away to Hawaii made me deliberate a great deal. To give more peace of mind from fellow head-fiers in a similar situation and given the paucity of reviews available, I decided to chime in with my thoughts on this Serbian masterpiece.
The system I have has Innuos Zenith MKII SE as the Roon core, feeding a dCS Bartok connected to the Trafomatic. Headphones used included Abyss AB1266 TC, ZMF Verite Closed and MMR Thummim. I should note that dCS unit does have an excellent solid state amp included with it and if were saner I should have been satisfied with the excellent one-box easy-peasey set-it-and-forget-it simplicity of the dCS, but those in the head-fi game long enough find it hard to resist the siren song of the vacuum tube.
The study/listening room where the dCS resides has overhead LED lighting which is bright and revealing but when those lights are switched off, the Trafomatic takes over and coats the room with a soothing orange glow kinda like the lighting you would see in the bar of a historic hotel.
It is fitting that has that effects visually because it is virtually identical how it bends and shapes the music to be more aesthetically pleasing.
A solid state amplifier in the Bartok is a pillar of marble. The Primavera tube amplifier is the marble after Michelangelo has finished chiseling. What is takes away makes it immeasurably more realistic. The amazing thing is the way it leaves the details so lifelike and striking, like the veins coursing through the arms of David in Florence.
Normally this chiseling away leaves auditory rough edges in tube amps of inferior quality - and while I enjoy snap, crackle and pop in my breakfast cereal I appreciate them not being in my tube amp. The house made transformers and masterful craftsmanship evident in the amp design leave no doubt that a renaissance in tube amp design is taking place in Serbia.
As far specifics on sound quality, here are some of my initial impressions. My approach is not only to take my favorite songs that tend to sound great - but also take tracks that present challenges on other amps and see if the amp in question can rescue them and mask their blemishes. Virtually every song I threw at the Trafomatic bested the solid state presentation on the Bartok, which is really saying something. On the Bartok, “Back in Black” has a visceral, powerful presentation appropriate to the musical muscle of AC/DC. The Primavera smooths the bass notes and the percussion and sandpapers a bit of the grit from Brian Johnston’s vocals. “Radio Free Europe” by R.E.M. is one of my go-to tracks for reviewing as the quality of mastering is bettered only by the quality of the album. It can be a bit bright on solid state given the roughness inherent in a lot of indie rock records, but the Primavera files away the sharp edges and lets the music present organically. As far as the mids go, I can think of no better track than “Slow Burn” by Kacey Musgraves - the Primavera is like a generous deli purveyor giving an extra thick shmear of cream cheese on your bagel. Smooth and rich - just what you want in mids.
It one thing for an amp to make music made with real instruments sound like, well, music made by real instruments. What really surprised me about the Primavera, however, is how the amp makes modern digital music (pop, hip hop, EDM) sound closer to music made by real instruments. This is the real secret sauce of the amp for my tastes. Drum machine notes sound less machine-like and more drum-like, and TR808 bass have more fluidity and body like real bass guitars. I never thought a track like “Juice” by Lizzo could get more bounce and vitality behind it, but the magic of the tubes breathes lifelike realism to the synthesizers.
Should you consider a tube amp, the Primavera should be high on your list. The customer service is exemplary (I had a question about the amp before buying - and both the Sasa Cokic the manufacturer and Fred Crane the US distributor both got back to me within 24 hours), the stock tubes are awesome and the construction top-notch. It offers the sonic benefit of a quiet background like solid state with acoustic accoutrements that only tubes can provide.
The system I have has Innuos Zenith MKII SE as the Roon core, feeding a dCS Bartok connected to the Trafomatic. Headphones used included Abyss AB1266 TC, ZMF Verite Closed and MMR Thummim. I should note that dCS unit does have an excellent solid state amp included with it and if were saner I should have been satisfied with the excellent one-box easy-peasey set-it-and-forget-it simplicity of the dCS, but those in the head-fi game long enough find it hard to resist the siren song of the vacuum tube.
The study/listening room where the dCS resides has overhead LED lighting which is bright and revealing but when those lights are switched off, the Trafomatic takes over and coats the room with a soothing orange glow kinda like the lighting you would see in the bar of a historic hotel.
It is fitting that has that effects visually because it is virtually identical how it bends and shapes the music to be more aesthetically pleasing.
A solid state amplifier in the Bartok is a pillar of marble. The Primavera tube amplifier is the marble after Michelangelo has finished chiseling. What is takes away makes it immeasurably more realistic. The amazing thing is the way it leaves the details so lifelike and striking, like the veins coursing through the arms of David in Florence.
Normally this chiseling away leaves auditory rough edges in tube amps of inferior quality - and while I enjoy snap, crackle and pop in my breakfast cereal I appreciate them not being in my tube amp. The house made transformers and masterful craftsmanship evident in the amp design leave no doubt that a renaissance in tube amp design is taking place in Serbia.
As far specifics on sound quality, here are some of my initial impressions. My approach is not only to take my favorite songs that tend to sound great - but also take tracks that present challenges on other amps and see if the amp in question can rescue them and mask their blemishes. Virtually every song I threw at the Trafomatic bested the solid state presentation on the Bartok, which is really saying something. On the Bartok, “Back in Black” has a visceral, powerful presentation appropriate to the musical muscle of AC/DC. The Primavera smooths the bass notes and the percussion and sandpapers a bit of the grit from Brian Johnston’s vocals. “Radio Free Europe” by R.E.M. is one of my go-to tracks for reviewing as the quality of mastering is bettered only by the quality of the album. It can be a bit bright on solid state given the roughness inherent in a lot of indie rock records, but the Primavera files away the sharp edges and lets the music present organically. As far as the mids go, I can think of no better track than “Slow Burn” by Kacey Musgraves - the Primavera is like a generous deli purveyor giving an extra thick shmear of cream cheese on your bagel. Smooth and rich - just what you want in mids.
It one thing for an amp to make music made with real instruments sound like, well, music made by real instruments. What really surprised me about the Primavera, however, is how the amp makes modern digital music (pop, hip hop, EDM) sound closer to music made by real instruments. This is the real secret sauce of the amp for my tastes. Drum machine notes sound less machine-like and more drum-like, and TR808 bass have more fluidity and body like real bass guitars. I never thought a track like “Juice” by Lizzo could get more bounce and vitality behind it, but the magic of the tubes breathes lifelike realism to the synthesizers.
Should you consider a tube amp, the Primavera should be high on your list. The customer service is exemplary (I had a question about the amp before buying - and both the Sasa Cokic the manufacturer and Fred Crane the US distributor both got back to me within 24 hours), the stock tubes are awesome and the construction top-notch. It offers the sonic benefit of a quiet background like solid state with acoustic accoutrements that only tubes can provide.
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ufospls2
Headphoneus Supremus
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Out of curiosity, how hot does the Primavera get? Thanks for sharing your thoughts
MaggotBrain
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With a 6 foot DHC Prion cable I am far enough away to not feel it at all. If you don’t have much air flow / cooling options in your room you may wish to have a longer cable. If I didn’t have a ceiling fan going you might feel if you get really close. Sort of similar in heat equivalency to being next to a decent-sized simmering pot or an old-school lamp with multiple incandesent bulbs with the lampshade removed. I used to work in a forging plant (heating metal to a gazillion degrees until it turns orange, scooping it up with five foot pliers and placing it a press to make auto/truck parts) - which really really really sucked and probably more than anything made me study hard in school. So, yeah, WAY better than that!
I might be crazy here, but has anyone tried the primavera with the Meze Elite or Empyrean?
I feel Esoteric N05XD could beat Bartok in both dac as well as amp parts easily, plus it comes with streamer.When I put my fingers to the keyboard to describe my impressions of the Trafomatic Primavera Headphone Amplifier, for some reasons my thoughts centered around the Athenian philosopher Plato. Plato was famous for his descriptions of the ideal - that he had never seen a perfect circle or a perfectly straight line but he had an idea of what those should be and await to be discovered. And if we transferred Plato some twenty four hundred years into the future, placed a headphone on his formidable noggin and engaged in a Socratic dialogue about the ideal tube headphone amplifier - he would likely picture the Trafomatic Primavera amp.
The Trafomatic Primavera is a Serbian designed hand-built high end tube amplifier that retails for $15,000 from Audio Prana in the US. I was drawn to a potential end-game amp given the nature of gear I possessed already but the real world ramifications of shipping such a beast thousands of miles away to Hawaii made me deliberate a great deal. To give more peace of mind from fellow head-fiers in a similar situation and given the paucity of reviews available, I decided to chime in with my thoughts on this Serbian masterpiece.
The system I have has Innuos Zenith MKII SE as the Roon core, feeding a dCS Bartok connected to the Trafomatic. Headphones used included Abyss AB1266 TC, ZMF Verite Closed and MMR Thummim. I should note that dCS unit does have an excellent solid state amp included with it and if were saner I should have been satisfied with the excellent one-box easy-peasey set-it-and-forget-it simplicity of the dCS, but those in the head-fi game long enough find it hard to resist the siren song of the vacuum tube.
The study/listening room where the dCS resides has overhead LED lighting which is bright and revealing but when those lights are switched off, the Trafomatic takes over and coats the room with a soothing orange glow kinda like the lighting you would see in the bar of a historic hotel.
It is fitting that has that effects visually because it is virtually identical how it bends and shapes the music to be more aesthetically pleasing.
A solid state amplifier in the Bartok is a pillar of marble. The Primavera tube amplifier is the marble after Michelangelo has finished chiseling. What is takes away makes it immeasurably more realistic. The amazing thing is the way it leaves the details so lifelike and striking, like the veins coursing through the arms of David in Florence.
Normally this chiseling away leaves auditory rough edges in tube amps of inferior quality - and while I enjoy snap, crackle and pop in my breakfast cereal I appreciate them not being in my tube amp. The house made transformers and masterful craftsmanship evident in the amp design leave no doubt that a renaissance in tube amp design is taking place in Serbia.
As far specifics on sound quality, here are some of my initial impressions. My approach is not only to take my favorite songs that tend to sound great - but also take tracks that present challenges on other amps and see if the amp in question can rescue them and mask their blemishes. Virtually every song I threw at the Trafomatic bested the solid state presentation on the Bartok, which is really saying something. On the Bartok, “Back in Black” has a visceral, powerful presentation appropriate to the musical muscle of AC/DC. The Primavera smooths the bass notes and the percussion and sandpapers a bit of the grit from Brian Johnston’s vocals. “Radio Free Europe” by R.E.M. is one of my go-to tracks for reviewing as the quality of mastering is bettered only by the quality of the album. It can be a bit bright on solid state given the roughness inherent in a lot of indie rock records, but the Primavera files away the sharp edges and lets the music present organically. As far as the mids go, I can think of no better track than “Slow Burn” by Kacey Musgraves - the Primavera is like a generous deli purveyor giving an extra thick shmear of cream cheese on your bagel. Smooth and rich - just what you want in mids.
It one thing for an amp to make music made with real instruments sound like, well, music made by real instruments. What really surprised me about the Primavera, however, is how the amp makes modern digital music (pop, hip hop, EDM) sound closer to music made by real instruments. This is the real secret sauce of the amp for my tastes. Drum machine notes sound less machine-like and more drum-like, and TR808 bass have more fluidity and body like real bass guitars. I never thought a track like “Juice” by Lizzo could get more bounce and vitality behind it, but the magic of the tubes breathes lifelike realism to the synthesizers.
Should you consider a tube amp, the Primavera should be high on your list. The customer service is exemplary (I had a question about the amp before buying - and both the Sasa Cokic the manufacturer and Fred Crane the US distributor both got back to me within 24 hours), the stock tubes are awesome and the construction top-notch. It offers the sonic benefit of a quiet background like solid state with acoustic accoutrements that only tubes can provide.
I would add Riviera& Susvara(stock tube): 2, 1, 2aWell, I think I made the bass ranking pretty clear.Still, here’s a quick rank:
Resolution Bass Stage 009/T2 2 2 2a SR1a/HSA-1a 1* 3 1 Susvara/Primavera 3 1* 2b
The asterisks indicate that the difference between #1 and the others is significant. All other rankings are matters of smaller degree.
I don’t find this approach very satisfactory though. Unfortunately, I think we do too much of audio this way. And it creates a false sense of hierarchy. For example, I find the RAAL combo an unbelievable value for the extraordinary resolution, detail, speed, and air. But if you’ve gotta have real bass, where you (think you) can feel the depths of the piano, the interior wood of the bass, or the organ pipes, it’s a non-starter. If you want the sense of an earfield monitor, rather than cups on your head, it’s one of your best choices (along with the excellent MySphere). And the value of the RAAL is just amazing. For less than $4k, and an amp you might already own, you have a TOTL headphone experience. And for less than another $1k, you can add the Schiit JotR to drive it beautifully. From a cost perspective, compared to the other two here, it’s a no-brainer. As long as you don’t need extended bass,
Similarly, neither the 009S nor the Susvara provides as good a side-to-side or front-to-back soundstage as the SR1a, but they’re still quite rewarding. Considering they are headphones, both have among the better soundstages out there. Both manage to create some illusion of a stage just forward of the listener and with greater width than the size of one’s head. So, there’s no bad in that category for either headphone. They’re just not as good as the SR1a.
Anyway.
Stax X9000&T2( Mullard tube): 2a, 1, 1
( PSVANE EL34): 1, 2,1
MaggotBrain
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Haven’t heard the Esoteric but the DAC compares favorably with the Chord Dave/M scaler in my speaker rig. Pricey but quite good. The headphone amp is powerful enough to drive an Abyss TC but the Riviera opens the mids up and makes the bass hypnotic. It does serve as a Roon Endpoint so you can stream right to it provided you have a core elsewhere.
ufospls2
Headphoneus Supremus
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Buying that BHSE back in December sort of broke my resolve to not get involved with tubes after a decade of giving them a miss largely and stoked a fire of curiosity. I really enjoyed what it was doing (and of course I know various tubes and tube based amps don't all sound the same) but I was curious about running the 1266TC from tubes, vs my SS option in the Boulder 866. Decided against putting the audio budget towards a pair of Shang Sr, as with an amp you can use it with lots of headphones vs the entire budget going into one sound signature (not that the Shang SR isn't excellent.)
I was quoted a 3-4 month wait for the Primavera so I got it ordered and am settling in for the wait. Combined with the T2 I have coming from Kerry (hoping for September on that one,) and my Boulder for SS duties, I should certainly be pretty set in terms of amps for a good long while.
Just need to figure out a DAC now, once I have saved up again, it never ends. Haha
I was quoted a 3-4 month wait for the Primavera so I got it ordered and am settling in for the wait. Combined with the T2 I have coming from Kerry (hoping for September on that one,) and my Boulder for SS duties, I should certainly be pretty set in terms of amps for a good long while.
Just need to figure out a DAC now, once I have saved up again, it never ends. Haha
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Paul at Z-axis
Member of the Trade: Z-Axis Audio (UK)
Did you get the Primavera? Interested in your thoughts, also how the Verite Closed sound via this amp anyone?
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MaggotBrain
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The VC sounds amazing with the Primavera. A great combo IMHO. I mainly use it with the Abyss TC so I eventually sold my VC to fund another toy.
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