Integrated Amp Reviews

Robert Schryer returned to the Grandinote Shinai in April 2021 (Vol.44 No.4):

Eight weeks after I'd submitted my review of the 37Wpc Grandinote Shinai integrated amplifier ($15,000), whose return to Reinhard Goerner of importer/distributor Goerner Audio was delayed due to the pandemic lockdown, the Italian integrated amp blew open.

I don't mean that it exploded; I mean its sound exploded: It blew open musically. As good as it was already, the sound went from here up to there, overnight. In 16 hours, the amp underwent a transformation that caused it to sound expressively freer.

Early on, as I was writing my review, Reinhard Goerner told me that the Shinai was newish. I thought he meant it was essentially up to date. (The Shinai has been in production for more than 10 years, with, presumably, a few small changes along the way.) Not once during the two months I'd used the Shinai for my review did it give off that new-car smell or exhibit the wonky tonal balance (its voice changing?) that are the telltale signs of a component crossing the threshold into adulthood. That's what Goerner had meant: It was still very young and improving. I should have noticed.

When I first heard the changes, my immediate thought was: "Wow, cool!" My second thought was: "Oh no! What have I done?" The latter thought occurred because my review was already finished; I had already delivered my verdict. It was positive and mostly accurate but based on incomplete information. I would need to write a follow-up review and submit it as soon as possible.

First, though, I needed to be sure the changes were real and not something my brain concocted. I A/B'ed the Shinai against my tubed separates: the Audible Illusions L3A preamp and Antique Sound Labs AQ-1009 DT monoblocks. Within a minute, the verdict was in. My gear fared glaringly worse than before in that direct comparison. The difference was too noticeable to have been a figment of my imagination or a consequence of having gotten used to the amplifier's sound. The Shinai had shifted into higher gear.

My plan of action was straightforward. I would relisten to the same music I'd listened to before, through my KEF LS50s and the Totem Skylights I still have in-house.

I began where I started the last time, with Roger Waters's Amused to Death (CD, Columbia CK47127). The 3D mixing process (footnote 1) on this album is impressive, but this is early-1990s digital and the sound is just so-so. Amused to Death showed me that the new, improved version of this Italian amp wasn't mercilessly accentuating the bad aspects of the sound, nor was it masking it. Rather, the Shinai was emphasizing what's good about the sound. The improved Shinai imbued the Roger Waters CD with extra color, sweetness that verged on warmth, and an even more intricate spatial layout, with GPS-level clarity that allowed me to zoom in on images.

Everything from Waters's voice to the electric guitar, to the tom-toms and piano, sounded at once bigger and more focused—a rare combination, since sonic images usually are bigger because they are unfocused. Now, images hovered near the water pipes that run just below my ceiling, bigger than life yet so realistically proportioned and dynamically vibrant that they seemed lifelike yet unexaggerated. I never got the impression I was hearing the music in a way that was different from the way it was recorded.

My ASL mono amps make smaller images, more realistically sized and less lifelike than this. Their sonic reconstructions, compared to the Shinai's, lack structural integrity. In a quick A/B test with the newly mature Shinai, my ASLs sounded congested, grainier, grayer, and less fleet-of-foot.

The 60Wpc ASLs did have one trick up their sleeve: They bested the Shinai in delivering propulsive bass energy and balmy whomp. But that's the only thing they did better.

Patricia Barber's Hammond B-3 organ, on Companion (CD, Premonition/Blue Note 5 22963 2), has never sounded more there than it did here. The sound dispatched by a finger-roll across the keypad sliced the air a foot from my chest with crystalline clarity. Bass-string finger flicks have never been more graphic. The venue was bigger now, filled with more of the crackling life force that makes being at a live concert feel like a unique, visceral, you-are-here moment.

On the hypnotic Floratone II (CD, Savoy Jazz SVY17855), by the Floratone collective, with Bill Frisell, I heard—I swear—sounds emerging from directly behind other sounds. There wasn't just a new range of depth to behold; there were newly excavated trenches of underground activity, confirming what I've long suspected: that the most dramatic musical secrets are stored in the richer-toned, lower frequency range, from 200Hz or so on down. Exhume that area, and the musical pathways that emerge in the low light can seem labyrinthine and eternal.

Listening to Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda (LP, Impulse! IMP-228), first on the Shinai and then on my ASLs, was akin to driving off a freshly paved autobahn onto a dirt road. I'm exaggerating, but that was the sensation. Once I got a taste for how the Shinai embodied the chemistry among Coltrane and her cohorts, returning to my ASLs' more ragtag portrayal was a letdown.

Please don't get me wrong: My ASLs can sound very good, but their performance is diminished in comparison with the Shinai. It pains me that the Shinai has to go back. Who wants to relinquish better?

Or better than better? Or another sort of better? Things took an interesting turn when, on a whim, I plugged my tubed Audible Illusions L3A preamp into one of the Shinai's line inputs and turned the latter's volume control way up.

It's not as weird as it sounds, or at least I don't think it is, and if it is I don't especially care. The Shinai's preamp section is refined but minimal. When you turn the volume control up all the way, there's not a lot of electronic clutter inside it to get in the way of the sound.

Maybe it was the continuousness of the musical signal passing through the units' philosophically similar designs—both units employ simple circuits with short signal paths and operate in class-A—but whatever juju was happening between them, the resulting synergy pricked my feathered tail, engaged my attention, and made me miss supper.

The level of transparency didn't change—it was already stunning—nor did the image size. What the Shinai+L3A did was flesh things out a little more, adding sheets of harmonic content across a luxuriant landscape where colors sparkled and the tiniest sounds had body. Images seemed less crisp, their outlines hazier, but the sun was warmer and the scenery more supple.

A run-through of the recordings I'd listened to previously with the Shinai revealed the differences as consistent: Coltrane's harp projected more girth and rainbow waves. Guitar strings on the Waters CD sounded more natural, the backup singers' voices more stickily moist. The individual cricket chirps that open the album twinkled, instruments on the Floratone CD sounded more like the materials they're made of, and Patricia Barber's live recording delivered more on-stage presence and crowd-interaction dynamics than they had without the preamplifier.

In fact, my CDs never sounded so good. I'm used to hearing a digital overlay akin to a see-through plastic divider between me and my CDs. Now that was all but gone. The music bulged from my speakers with a magnetism that made choosing what format to play—CD or LP—moot. Each format now had its own charisma.

Which encouraged me to try out more CDs. With the Audible Illusions preamp still connected, I played the Ginger Baker Trio's Going Back Home (CD, Atlantic CD 82652). Ginger's drum kit was splayed in a perfect arc around him, each drum flashing into illuminated life when struck. His tempos sounded tighter and more insistent than usual, and I felt like I could see his wrists pivoting down at the joint with each high-velocity snap. Cymbals spilled out fine-grained texture, like Cuban beach sand.

Even Cannonball Adderley's Mercy, Mercy, Mercy: Live at "The Club" (CD, Capitol Jazz 7243 8 29915 2 6)—a thin, bright recording—was a hoot. The Shinai/L3A combo couldn't transform it into tomahawk steak (footnote 2), but it was in T-bone territory, meatier and juicier. I had the sense that I was eavesdropping on indiscernible private chatter and could tell, among the more rambunctious patrons of "The Club," which had imbibed more. The air around us—us, since I was with them, and they with me—was charged and tingling, the musicians and the crowd more like real people than AM-radio cut-outs. The performance—the playing, the air, the groove—had been given a shot of Pinocchio wish-magic: What was once a wooden copy had turned real—and when I wrote that my nose didn't get longer, because it's true.

I even danced—okay, stomped around and jerked—which may sound like a frivolous thing to point out, but I don't think it is. It's a sign of total, physical immersion in the music, of forgetting I had a body.

The best sound will make me do that: sit rapt for minutes on end without budging, breathing just enough that I don't keel over, until I am swept to my feet by a blissful impulse to celebrate the gloriousness of what I'm hearing, to thank it for its generosity like a tribesman giving thanks to, and for, the sun. Because, just as life is mental and physical—and also spiritual and whatever else—to me, "immersive" isn't the right word if only the mind is immersed. It must be the body, too, and also the soul if such a thing exists. (Musical experiences like this are a good argument for it, it seems to me.) But certainly it's about the body, at the least, which explains my awkward tribal dance.

I asked whether Grandinote builds a stereo amp, because if you're going to use a preamp, a non-integrated amplifier makes a lot more sense. They do. The one with single-ended inputs (to match my Audible Illusions pre) is called the Essenza. Its design is similar to that of the Shinai, but it costs about $24,000—way more than I can afford.

It doesn't matter. The Shinai is fine enough. By itself, it sounds great solo, rich and bloomy but with a sense that you're hearing the true, original thing and not a recording. With the tubed preamp added, it sounds like—well, like what I wrote above. The Shinai opened my ears.—Rob Schryer

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Footnote 1: Amused to Death was mixed using QSound, an audio algorithm that manipulates crosstalk to facilitate more dramatic positioning of sound objects in space.—Editor

Footnote 2: A tomahawk steak, apparently, is one of those bone-in caveman ribeyes that look like, well, a tomahawk. I had to look it up.—Editor