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Robert Deutsch says, "There is something special about SETs: a kind of midrange magic, a harmonic rightness that tends to elude other amplifier designs." But how to get more power from a single-ended triode design? In his review of the Air Tight ATM-211 monoblock power amplifier RD discovers one answer.

"Thus it was that those devilish tiny triodes lit their filaments behind mine beady eyes, and the next thing you know...," Jonathan Scull relates, snuggling up to the Lamm Industries ML1 monoblock power amplifier. "Despite its Bomber Command meters, the ML1 is 21st Century under the skin," he adds.

J. Gordon Holt and various other Stereophile writers pipe the VTL MB300 and MB450 Signature monoblock amplifiers and we collect all of their observations in one handy archive. "Not only does the venerable vacuum tube refuse to lie down and die, as everyone predicted when audio went solid-state," says JGH, "it continues to deliver better performance than anyone had imagined it could."

For his "The Fifth Element #12," John Marks scrutinizes Harbeth's top-of-the-line Monitor 40 loudspeaker and ponders whether or not "behind every engineering standard [there] are at least a couple of horses' fannies."

Finally, the latest installment in our "Recording of the Month" series for the online archives: Recording of February 1997, The Age of Cathedrals. The Middle Ages dark and distant? Wes Phillips discovers that, "with this lovely, luminous performance, Theater of Voices shows us that it ain't necessarily so."