Brilliant Corners #20: The Hunt for Red October

No one I know enjoys dating. Some friends detest it so much they won't go near it. Maybe they believe the love of their life is waiting to be discovered at a Zumba class or in line at the King Kullen. Or maybe they've quietly given up. Admit it: Dating offers a low probability of success, and if you think too much about just how low, the whole thing begins to seem ridiculous. Yet how do you meet a potential partner without, well, meeting them?

My first exposure to the perils of dating happened when I was 12. For my mother's birthday, my grandparents gave her a membership in a computer dating service. It was the early '80s, and what the computer was contributing I'm not entirely sure. My mother felt understandably wary and insisted that the dates come to our apartment in Queens and, more unusually, that I be present. Maybe she thought the prospect of going to the home of a 33-year-old woman with a nearly teenage son would discourage the uncommitted.

The first to show up was Drew (I've made up the names). He was heavyset and damp, wore the kind of a suit you might see at a locksmith expo in Omaha, and carried a leatherette briefcase. He looked aggrieved, or maybe that was just his face. After he walked in, he plopped the briefcase on our kitchen table, took out some papers, and said to my mother, "I'd like to compare divorces." Then, running two fingers through his combover and casting a look at me, he added, "And maybe junior could give us some privacy."

My favorite of the computer dates was Zahid. Originally from Bangladesh, he managed a rotisserie restaurant, part of a popular Manhattan chain called Chirping Chicken. Zahid was no fool and arrived with several bags of his product, which we could smell as soon as he stepped out of the elevator. My mother and I had just come home and were famished. The three of us spent the night around the kitchen table drinking RC Cola and devouring the fragrant chicken. Zahid looked triumphant. In between bites, he winked at my mother and exclaimed, "with a girl like you, I can sit all night through," pleased at the rhyme. As it turned out, my mother and Zahid did not go on a second date, but I think about that night whenever I'm in upper Manhattan and pass a Chirping Chicken, which is still going strong.

I suppose I learned that finding a suitable romantic partner takes more than access to really good chicken. Much later, I realized that most of us are looking not just for someone we like spending time with but someone who sees our best self and occasionally even makes us believe we are that person. Someone who brings out what's worthiest in us. But even if you're lucky enough to have someone like this in your life, don't you occasionally wonder whether there isn't someone else out there who would suit you even better?

Why am I writing about dating in a column about tube amps? Because a version of this dilemma shows up in our listening lives, too, and this is a story about an unlikely pairing. You see, I'd argue that the single most important hi-fi component is the amp-speaker interface. Not the amp or the speaker, because their performance is so interdependent. Get this relationship right, and you're mostly there, because great synergy can minimize either component's limitations. On the other hand, the world's greatest endgame statement speaker (if such a thing exists) will sound like canned gravy when driven by the wrong amplifier. But how do we know whether we have the right amp ... or the right speaker? Fact is, unless you're listening through a powered speaker system, you've consigned yourself to being a contestant on an electro-acoustical version of The Bachelorette.

In my loft, I've found happiness with the Klipsch La Scalas. I remain enthralled by the way they combine big-orchestra dynamics, scale, and saturated tone color with good-enough resolution and real delicacy. More importantly, they energize my very large (55' × 20' × 15.5') living space with more authority than any speakers I've auditioned since moving here some 12 years ago. This means that for the foreseeable future, the big Klipsch horns are here to stay. The job ahead is finding an amplifier or three that will make suitable, even inspired, partners.

The problem is that the La Scalas don't always play well with others. A number of perfectly worthy amps I've tried just haven't worked, an awkward situation for an audio reviewer with a pair of 200lb speakers and a bad back. Sometimes these incompatibilities are difficult to sort out; at other times they are fairly easy to predict. The solid state amps I've tried sound too buttoned-up and dry for my liking. And while I happen to enjoy a great many low-powered triode amplifiers of the single-ended variety, the La Scalas definitely do not.

In the measurements that accompanied my review of the La Scalas, John Atkinson determined their sensitivity to be a sky-high 101.3dB(B)/2.83V/m—the second most sensitive speakers he's tested—commenting that they "will play loudly even with a flea-powered amplifier." Technically speaking, John is correct—they can be deafening with a single watt. But he also noted that the Klipsch's impedance rises and falls sharply between 4 and 20 ohms in the bass range, suggesting a need for an amplifier with some muscle—or, in John's more precise formulation, an amplifier "not fazed by 4 ohm loads." So it's not entirely surprising that when driven by SET amps in my loft, the La Scalas tend not to play coherently: the bass lags behind the mids and treble, sounding slow, loose, and rubbery. Not even the Line Magnetic LM-845IA, which squeezes a whopping 23W per side from its searing-hot 845 tubes, can extract consistently timely notes from the Klipschs' horn-loaded woofers, particularly when things get loud.

So when I recently took delivery of the Ampsandsound Red October (footnote 1), a single-ended headphone amp that puts out 8Wpc and can also drive speakers, I wasn't expecting it to spend much time connected to the La Scalas. I had asked to audition it mostly to reacquaint myself with headphone listening, but along the way discovered that it was a superb, maybe even astonishingly good, speaker amp with something to teach me about the mysteries of the speaker-amp interface.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. At a quick glance, the Red October offers five headphone outputs on its front panel, with impedances of 8, 16, 32, 100, and 300 ohms, respectively. Crucially, the headphone outputs are connected to corresponding windings in the output transformers, meaning that the amp delivers its full power to the headphone and is capable of driving fairly insensitive cans. The Red October can be switched between the headphone outputs and its 8 ohm speaker outputs with a rear-mounted rocker. There are two hum pots on the top of the unit, which work well but are nearly impossible to adjust with hands bigger than a child's without burning yourself on the tightly spaced tubes. The 300Bs are driven by a single 12AX7 double triode, an unusual two-stage design that lowers noise for headphone listening but makes the amp a rather low-gain proposition with speakers. Technically, the Red October is an integrated amp, as it has a volume control on the front, which can be useful for minimizing noise. But with the blessing of Ampsandsound's Justin Weber, I mostly used it as a power amp, with the volume control fully open, which made it sing with a richer, fuller voice.

Look a little closer, and you'll discover that the $13,000 Red October is a decidedly strange piece of work. First, though it's constructed on a single chassis made of thick, 10-gauge steel, it's a fully dual-mono design, with two power transformers, two 5U4G rectifiers, and even separate wiring layouts for each channel. Pop off the bottom panel and you'll see internal components arranged serenely on turret boards and wired point-to-point with some of the neatest solder joints I have seen. In this regard, only my Shindo Aurieges preamp outclasses the Red October. And grab your deodorant—the amp weighs 70lb, due in part to the elephantine output transformers, about which more later.

Best of all, Weber told me that he named the Red October after the Cold-War cable-TV chestnut in which a pre–30 Rock Alec Baldwin overacts for the ages as CIA analyst Jack Ryan. "I have a thing for boats," Weber said. "The name came from my love of the movie and the fanciest, biggest submarine I could think of." In fact, Weber, who has a day job as a social worker for the California Department of Corrections, tends to build components that look a little a like a Soviet submarine—bluntly functional rather than lovely. "I want them to be overbuilt and over-secured," he told me. "We don't look for the elegant answer as much as the overwhelmingly simple one."


Footnote 1: Ampsandsound, Tel: (949) 636-9076. Web: ampsandsound.com.

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COMMENTS
Ortofan's picture

... high efficiency/sensitivity, it also has an EPDR that goes down to about 2 ohms at several points.

A 300B type amp is not the best choice to drive such a load.
A better choice - and one that is far less expensive, yet could also be considered as an "heirloom" piece - is the Audio Research I/50.
The I/50 can maintain its power output into an impedance as low as 1 ohm.

https://www.hifinews.com/content/klipsch-la-scala-al5-loudspeaker

https://www.hifinews.com/content/audio-research-i50-integrated-amplifier

Toobman's picture

For driving the La Scalas, I strongly urge you try the Quicksilver Horn Monos, reviewed here in Stereophile a few years ago by Robert Deutsch. Quicksilver designed the Horn Monos specifically to pair with the Klipsch Heritage line. The Horn Monos are a 25wpc EL34/KT88/6L6 pair operating in push-pull mode. They make my La Scala AL5's sing like no other amp I've tried with them.

Ortofan's picture

... reviewed by Stereophile 22 years ago and has since been discontinued.

https://www.stereophile.com/tubepoweramps/581/index.html

https://quicksilveraudio.com/products/horn-mono-amp/

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