Recent content by ousi

I purchased this a couple years ago and returned to Amazon within 1 day of use. It has a very high noise floor which is a deal breaker immediately.

I had the Naim Mu-So Qb v2 a while ago. Found that sounds pretty strange and muddied. I know it's not the same product but they are from the same line (the newer all-in-one, digital products). It's likely they spent so much to the design and firmware and compromised on the circuit design for the...

Yea I ended up sending them back. I also sold my two LA90s since they are too close in performance to the AHB2. I ordered the extra AHB2 on Monday and it arrived yesterday (B&H Photo Video). Benchmark doesn't seem to have much in stock but B&H had some.

Forgot to mention that the monoblocks do get better after turning them on for 24 hours, though they are drawing approximately 100W doing so. The vocal distortion that I noticed was lessened. Pretty sure for folks who never heard the Topping/Benchmark SOTA amps, they probably will be satisfied.

Yea, I tried the Freya+ passive mode which sounds just like the HPA4 or the Pre90 without any gain. For the tube stage, I whipped out a quartet of GE 6SN7 "NOS" tubes tonight and tried it out again. That fixed the instant fatigue. I kinda like the JFET buffer but once I switched back to Topping...

So, I spent the weekend to setup and play with my new Schiit (pun intended). tldr; I don't like the Freya+ and Tyr combo, especially so with the tube stage. I'm likely going for the RMA path, but still giving it a try till tomorrow after "warming them up" for a day. More detail below. Sources...

I bought a pair of 7B3 3 or 4 years ago when it was on sale from a close-out since the dealer is getting off all their Bryston stuff. I ended up making profit when I sold them :) It looks robust, and I had the 7B-ST, a 4B-ST and 4B-SST before moving to the cubed amp at that time. I still prefer...

It's the classic J2, so ES9026PRO

So, it seems like it did improved somewhat from JNOG :)

The SST and SST2 are great. Totally forgot about Bryston :) The Cubed amps inched towards the warm side which is not my cup of tea.

IIRC, the Maggies aren't that sensitive to high-ish noise floor, some vintage amps may work. As mentioned before from the experience of my friend, you can try some brute-force amp like the arc-welder Krell and Mark Levinson. Adcom GFA-5xxx series would work too on a budget. Or ATI stuff (not the...

I actually agree with Angsty that you should give the AHB2 a try. It's an "ear" opener first time I tried it (back then I had a stack of Nagra Classic Preamp + PSU + Amp). If you have the means, try to keep it as a reference system while you buy/sell/upgrade with other amps or components. I keep...

Yea, those are ribbon tweeters. Maggies draw a lot of current IIRC. The AHB2 may not work as I found them sound very linear, excellent resolution but doesn't have as much "oomph" especially when volume turned up, or for large dynamic as in orchestra recordings. I didn't try running AHB2 as...

Will do if I have time... My stuff usually sit for a week or so before I would have time to unbox and really try it out. For reference I currently run a pair of Topping LA90 (mono mode) + Matrix Element X as preamp. Before that I was running Spectral DMC30SV + DMA300RS - which I just sold...

Out of curiosity I bought a pair, with Freya+ . Was thinking about getting an ML585 or an Aesthetix MIMAS for "downsizing" but... oh well I came across this thread and Tyr got me interested. Its choke design is not common for transistors amps, but quite common for tube amps IIRC. If my other amp...