Thetiminator
Painfully virile
I have big Living Voice horns (105db) which I run with Boulder pre & power.
I was told that it would be sacrilege to use anything other than a top flight set with them, so I spent a month with various amps being sent over to me. I can’t remember them all now but the usual suspects from say £5k-£50k or so..
The best of them was a modded amp (can’t remember exactly but SJ Accoustics is in my head) at around £20k or thereabouts, and I would describe it as listenable at best.
Compared to the Boulders I found, to a man, they were all noisy, bloody unreliable, had rubbish bass, poor imaging, lacked detail and had very little attack.
Granted a couple of them did have lovely midrange’s and in that region a couple of them were perhaps the equal, or very slightly better than the Boulders, but not by much and in an extremely narrow frequency range.
It was bliss every time I switched the Boulders back on.
Of course this is all in my system, in my room and with my ears….
I should mention that I never tried any GT stuff - a few months after all this I was speaking to Paul from RFC and he told me that GT stuff was by far the best valve gear on the market and the only ones he’s ever seen that have truly low noise…
I was told that it would be sacrilege to use anything other than a top flight set with them, so I spent a month with various amps being sent over to me. I can’t remember them all now but the usual suspects from say £5k-£50k or so..
The best of them was a modded amp (can’t remember exactly but SJ Accoustics is in my head) at around £20k or thereabouts, and I would describe it as listenable at best.
Compared to the Boulders I found, to a man, they were all noisy, bloody unreliable, had rubbish bass, poor imaging, lacked detail and had very little attack.
Granted a couple of them did have lovely midrange’s and in that region a couple of them were perhaps the equal, or very slightly better than the Boulders, but not by much and in an extremely narrow frequency range.
It was bliss every time I switched the Boulders back on.
Of course this is all in my system, in my room and with my ears….
I should mention that I never tried any GT stuff - a few months after all this I was speaking to Paul from RFC and he told me that GT stuff was by far the best valve gear on the market and the only ones he’s ever seen that have truly low noise…