Solid State Preamp Reviews

Even when I began playing music, the KX-5 Twenty's user interface hindered rather than helped: With a CD playing in my Sony disc player, and with the appropriate input selected and the preamp's volume turned up to "20" (of a range of "0" to "46"), the signal still wasn't making its way through my amplifier and speakers. I'd assumed the Ayre wasn't muted because, according to the manual, when Mute is activated, whether via the remote or the front panel, this "temporarily [turns] the volume of the KX-5 to 'zero'"—and the front-panel display still read "20." It turns out that when Mute is activated, "0" or even "zero" does not appear on the display—rather, Mute is visually indicated by the display illuminating all of its decimal points. If there's a less intuitive way of getting across the notion of mute, I can't imagine it.

The user interface and owner's manual both need work.

Listening
Happily, the Ayre KX-5 Twenty sounded good. Really damn good.

As my listening notes remind me, singer Lee Feldman's voice in "Give Me My Money," and in other songs from his indispensable I've Forgotten Everything (CD, Urban Myth UM-114-2), sounded "amazing: lifelike and present and lacking in timbral colorations or other distortions." In "Me and My Sara Remaining," the way the accordion insinuates itself into the song was real and right, and in "Hippy Store," the sense of the backing combo—electric guitar, electric bass, Hammond organ, drums—playing between my speakers was uncanny. As I came to realize during its time in my system, the KX-5 Twenty was virtually unparalleled in its ability to suggest scale and spatial perspectives. With this disc, the only respect in which the Ayre could be bettered was its slight lack of texture in the sounds of the electric bass (although notes in the acoustic piano's left hand sounded "stringy" enough).

That lack of texture followed the Ayre to Leonard Cohen's second album, Songs from a Room (CD, Columbia/Legacy 88697 04740 2), on which the sound of the double bass was a little too smooth and rounded over. At this point in my listening I paused and double-checked these observations by reinstalling, for a couple of hours, my Shindo Laboratory Monbrison preamplifier—the differences between the two products' portrayals of sonic textures were quite apparent. But notes from that double bass were clear of pitch, and nimble. Voice articulation was superb without being clinical—especially in "The Partisan," I found it easier than ever to understand the three verses sung in French. More important, every song on this album was as moving as I always hope and expect them to be.

Sonic touch and force came across well through the KX-5 Twenty, albeit not quite as well as through the very best preamps I've heard. The soft, pizzicato cellos and double basses that begin Bruckner's Symphony 5, in a recording by Jascha Horenstein and the BBC Symphony Orchestra (CD, Intaglio INCD 7541), had decent pluck. At the other end of the scale, louder passages came across with clarity and poise: Never once did the music sound harsh or pinched or smaller than it should. In a larger and altogether more important musical sense, the Ayre allowed the Bruckner its strength of line and sense of purpose: heard through this preamp, every minute was electric.

The KX-5 Twenty also did well with rowdier music. In "Tanya," from Dexter Gordon's One Flight Up (LP, Blue Note/Cisco Music BLP 84176), the tension in Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen's double-bass lines—especially his double-stops later in the track—came across very well, and the sound of Art Taylor giving his drums hell was a delight. On this recording as others, more texture—in the sounds of all the instruments, really—can be had through better and generally more expensive electronics, but I found the Ayre satisfying, Gordon's tenor sax sounding especially good. And from a recently acquired mono copy of the Yardbirds' Five Live Yardbirds (LP, UK Columbia 33SX 1677), the sound of the 19-year-old Eric Clapton's electric guitar fairly leapt from the speakers. Hearing that record through the Ayre had me thinking not about spatial this or color that, but about what a great, raw-sounding band that was!

Indeed, I suppose the truest test of any piece of audio gear is its ability to connect the listener with the music, as when the product allows its user to appreciate new or heretofore underappreciated music. So it was when I played Grieg's incidental music from Peer Gynt, performed by Øiven Fjeldstad and the London Symphony Orchestra (CD, London/Classic Compact Discs CSCD 6049). I've always considered Grieg a second-rate composer (and not even a first-rate second-rate composer, as Richard Strauss once described himself), and I've tended to regard the Peer Gynt music in particular as nationalistic fluff, but minus the spark of genius that informed, say, Elgar's nationalistic fluff. I reached for this CD only because I knew it to be a recording of very high quality: the cardinal audiophile sin. But through the Ayre, that music steadfastly refused to be taken as mere audio-review fodder, and I found myself drawn into Grieg's melodies and orchestrations as never before. And I couldn't help hearing how the third selection, The Death of Ase, might have influenced Franz Waxman's brilliant score for The Bride of Frankenstein. So in the best of ways, the KX-5 Twenty earned its keep.

A final note: On the Ayre's last day here I unplugged it, removed its top cover, and had a look inside—after which I replaced the cover and remade all the connections, hoping to listen to just a few songs more. But when I flipped its rear-panel power switch, a single red light and the letters AC, in blue, appeared on the display. I consulted the manual and learned that this was the preamp's way of telling me that my household AC wasn't serving up the correct voltage. I shut down the preamp, measured my household current—a perfect 120V—and started over. This time there was no warning message, and everything worked just fine. I doubt that this episode reflects a problem of any sort—perhaps the line voltage had dipped overnight? I mention it here only in the interest of t-crossing and i-dotting.

Conclusions
I enjoyed the time I spent listening to the KX-5 Twenty—the time spent interacting with it, less so—and although I prefer the sound of my all-tube Shindo Monbrison preamp, the Ayre's remarkable and utterly nonclinical clarity, and its convincing, commandingly good spatial performance, made big impressions on me. Sonically, musically, and as a product of 21st-century American audio craftsmanship—that VGT system really must be seen to be appreciated (footnote 1)—the KX-5 Twenty offers decent value, especially to hobbyists who already own an Ayre amplifier; those who are starting from scratch and who enjoy Ayre's house sound might consider spending another $5000 and buying, instead, their AX-5 Twenty integrated amplifier. Recommended.

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Footnote 1: The legal department of TEN Publishing, parent company of Stereophile, may rest assured: I in no way recommend that owners of KX-5 Twentys go poking around inside their preamps, especially without first unplugging them and draining their power-supply capacitors.