Tube Power Amp Reviews

For this month's column, I did something I've occasionally set out to do but never quite managed: I lived with a new power amplifier for nearly two months, used it to enjoy a variety of records, made scads of listening notes, and wrote most of the subjective portion of my review—all without knowing what was inside it.

Few people in the high end know the difference between glorious excess and wretched folly as well as Harvey Rosenberg. Harvey's audio equipment always strives towards the glorious folly of providing the most romantic sound possible with modern technology. This may explain why his relatively small company, New York Audio Laboratories, can build an amplifier like the Futterman OTL-1, which costs a glorious $12,000 a stereo pair and actively competes for the title of best amplifier in the world.

Back at the beginning of 2017, Greg Roberts, of Volti Audio, devised a clever way to bring his Rival floorstanders up to my penthouse pad, for what resulted in a rave review of those horn-loaded wunderspeakers.

I live on the top floor of a seven-story, elevatorless building on a busy street in Greenwich Village. A vertical challenge? No problem! Roberts is resourceful in many things, from speaker design to his former profession, the building of custom homes. Affixing a pair of unguent-saturated straps to the screws on each side of a Rival, we lifted and transported the 106-lb speaker high in the gritty Manhattan sky as if it were child's play.

"How natural the sound," wrote Jonathan Scull in March 1994, in his Follow-Up on the original Jadis JA 200 monoblock amplifier, which then cost $18,990/pair. "How easy it was to follow the musical line and fall into the music. How deep, controlled, tight, and satisfying the bass. How magnifique the midrange—the traditional strength of the Jadis presentation. How full and satisfying the lower midrange. How open, airy, how right the highs—not at all hard, but very extended and natural. How involving their presentation. How full, how harmonically correct, how wonderfully compelling. How magical."

Ron Cox, Zen master and good friend from Zuni, New Mexico, gingerly navigated the crowded streets of Amp City—the essentially all-tube amp collection sprawled on my listening-room floor between the speakers. Ron had no trouble spotting the four chrome-and-black chassis of the JA 200s. He pointed a tentative finger: "Are those the Jedi?"

I have always been fascinated by audio power amplifiers. I even tried building about a hundred of them. My best friend in high school, Bill Brier, taught me the basics of soldering, wire management, and reading schematics. He loaned me his Dynaco Stereo 70, and gave me a hot-running, 20W, class-A transistor amp that he'd built on his mother's kitchen table. Bill took me to concerts, and taught me about classical and jazz music. He had perfect pitch, tuned pianos for money, played every instrument in the orchestra, and had memorized the complete keyboard works of J.S. Bach before he turned 16. And this stuff was all on the side—mainly, we built drag race cars together.

Manley is not a new company; it's the last name of the president and chief designer of VTL, David Manley, whose Model 300 has been my reference standard power amp for the past two years. In fact, Manley is not even a new brand name; it's the name of VTL's "deluxe" line of electronics, built (ostensibly) to industrial standards of ruggedness and reliability.

It's customary to think of "the tube sound" as being warm, rich, weak through the deep bass, fat through the midbass, forward through the midrange, bright through the middle highs, and soft at the extreme top, with superb rendition of depth and spaciousness. The "solid-state sound," by contrast, is generally thought to be cool, detailed, and pristine, with powerful deep bass, controlled midbass, rather reticent (laid-back) midrange and mid-highs, and a somewhat crisp high end, with variable (roulette-style) reproduction of depth and spatiality.