Any love for Air Tight Amps
- Thread starter oneills
- Start date
uncl_nigel
pfm Member
I've listened to ATM 1, 1S, 2 and 3 on many occasions.
Great in certain respects definitely not for me in others.
Really good for reproducing tonal nuances and harmonics especially if classical is your main diet.
I find the bass a little loose and "flabby" compared to my previous Aesthetix Atlas of current Moon 761.
I've never heard an Airtight power amp that didn't emit airborne buzzing noise from the transformers. They also tend to emit a lot of heat.
Great in certain respects definitely not for me in others.
Really good for reproducing tonal nuances and harmonics especially if classical is your main diet.
I find the bass a little loose and "flabby" compared to my previous Aesthetix Atlas of current Moon 761.
I've never heard an Airtight power amp that didn't emit airborne buzzing noise from the transformers. They also tend to emit a lot of heat.
uncl_nigel
pfm Member
PS: I actually met the boss man (before de passed away, obviously) in Lyon, a very courteous Japanese gent.
jonnypsvinyl
pfm Member
I had the 300B one for a bit. Not the best, to be honest. Noisy, and only managed to produce 4 of the claimed 8W. GT Audio knows a bit about them and is less than complimentary, I recall.
Tony L
Administrator
Always loved the look of these, just beautiful design with the build quality of the best ‘70s Japanese receivers etc. Kind of regret not hitting the ‘buy it now’ button on an AirTight valve preamp about a decade ago, but I’d just bought my Verdier and that’s done me well so far.
How did you test it , at what impedance- I assume you're talking about ATM-300R ?
I have owned ATM-2 for a short period but decided to go for integrated amplifier , AirTight sounded really good, powerful- drove my Kefs with an easy, lovely tonality for KT88 tubes - I much preferred ATM-2 to McIntosh MC275, transformer noise or it's level was no different from most of tube amplifiers I have owned over the time.
Insides of ATM-2, lovely point2point wiring, very neat IMO:
word of warning to the OP if decided to go for ATM-2 , is quite demanding on the output tubes and would eat through Chinese KT88 so don't skimp on quality KT88- I found EH tubes to be very reliable, Gold Lion isn't bad neither.
as to the lower power output from 300B Airtight, I don't know where this information comes from and how output was measured, what taps and with what load- Stereophile tested 300R amplifier and is capable to push 9W/ch from 8ohm taps into 8 ohm load but with THD+N @3% and same output from 4 ohm tap into 4 ohm load. Only with mismatched load ie: 4 ohm load on 8 ohm tap clipping occurs early and would deliver less output- 4.5W/ch at 3%THD+N but this would be the case with most SE amps.
word of warning to the OP if decided to go for ATM-2 , is quite demanding on the output tubes and would eat through Chinese KT88 so don't skimp on quality KT88- I found EH tubes to be very reliable, Gold Lion isn't bad neither.
as to the lower power output from 300B Airtight, I don't know where this information comes from and how output was measured, what taps and with what load- Stereophile tested 300R amplifier and is capable to push 9W/ch from 8ohm taps into 8 ohm load but with THD+N @3% and same output from 4 ohm tap into 4 ohm load. Only with mismatched load ie: 4 ohm load on 8 ohm tap clipping occurs early and would deliver less output- 4.5W/ch at 3%THD+N but this would be the case with most SE amps.