When I saw the THD+N I thought, "now this is a tube amp!" And to the designer's credit they go for the open chassis look so they can fully rock the glowing bulbs in the dark thing. The low output impedance is typical as well. Means all kind of unpredictable interactions with the impedance curve of the loudspeakers they are driving. And some people probably regard it as more of a feature than a bug. I think that characteristic alone accounted for 90 percent of the amp-churning among high end audiophiles in the 1980's and 1990's as they looked to find the perfect serendipitous synergy between their TAS recommended tube amp and their TAS recommended loudspeakers so as to deliver audio nirvana to their living rooms. Yep, talking about using amps as EQ devices for people for eschewed EQ because they believe it 'severely smeared the signal', even while putting a sound effect generator in their signal path coloring everything in the same way a squirt of Ghirardelli chocolate syrup would color every sip of your morning espresso. So all in all the typical tube mess, one sect of the audiophile world seems to venerate highly even today. To each his own.
But the true deal breaker (even for them) on this unit is the drastically rolled off FR at each extreme. I suppose if you're old and can't hear anything above10k hz, the -4.5 db roll off at 20 k hz makes no difference. Likewise, if you're also listening to some kind of mini-monitor whose response falls off a cliff below 100 hz, you might not even notice the bass roll off either. So for deaf old guys with mini-monitors who love to bathe in the golden tube glow of ultra high 2nd harmonic distortion, this might just be their amp. And apparently lots of them write reviews for Amazon.
Thanks for being a better reviewer than those deaf old geezers, Amir.
DSC_0193(2a) by Mark Hardy, on Flickr
