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Sonneteer Alabaster tweaks

A

audiojoy

pfm Member
This is one hell of an amp, loads of PRAT and emotion but with valve like aspects such as smoothness and refinement, timbrel detail and soundstaging. Also dynamic as hell in my set up. It is not as relentless as a Naim but has its PRAT but also the best aspects of the Sugden A21. You can tap your foot and listen for hours without too much fatigue. I just wonder what heights this amp can be taken to. Inside simple regulators are used for the preamp board cheap stamped phono connectors, cheap blue pot and electrolytics are panasonics, i think the polyesters can be kept.

How about elna cerafines, super regulators, and a noble pot??

Has anyone done anytweaks to this or its brother the Campion. It seem like a rather special amp to me. What NAIM should have been striving for IMO
 
I asked the designer the same question last night, and i was told that regardless of what components were used in terms of price and make, the amp had been so finely tuned that changing any one component might then need a change in the circuit or another component to rertun it to how it should sound as done BY EAR, yes you heard right and i am assuming he is an Engineer.

All I can say is that the Alabaster is probably the best amplifier I have ever come across considering the emotion it conjures up. The timing is so spot on and the way it reproduces crescendos and the build up to am emotive section in a piece is unsurpassed. I cannot exclude my Kudos C30 speakers fom not contributing heavily to this either. I think last night i got so overwhelmed i stood up and started acting like a nutter conducting the orchestra.

If I had a critism of this amp, and its only because of my long association with tube gear, id say that the last bit of three demensionality, air and timbrel accuracy that I hear with the best valve amps is missing a little.


I will probably start with just the pot or stamped phono plugs first and hope that hese will have the least effect on the overall beautiful music making areas of this amp.
 
audiojoy said:
cheap stamped phono connectors, cheap blue pot and electrolytics are panasonics, i think the polyesters can be kept.

How about elna cerafines, super regulators, and a noble pot??
Click to expand...

Panasonic caps generally sound better than Cerafines.
Some think that cheap nickel plated phonos sound better than chunky gold plated phonos.
If the pot is an Alps Blue, then you are already at the point of vastly diminishing returns.

Super-regs will kill the music. Standard 3-terminal regs (with careful) use, sound better.

All (except the phono comment) IMO and after 20+ years of tweaking.
 
Is the schematic available anywhere?

I don't know the amp, so have no idea what technology it contains.
 
S-MAn as you are no doubt aware we have super regulator designs galore coming from the Naim corner, e.g Teddy, so as they have been proclaimed to have great benefits on the sonics that I'm after, PRAT etc, i assumed this must be the way to go with this amp also.


Schematics?? I could ask the Sonneteer designer
 
I have tried ALW regs and Coffin regs but not Teddy regs (which are a totally different design). All the op-amp based ones provide plenty of hifi sound but somehow spoil my enjoyment of the music by sounding bland. I have tried them on NJ-boards and many other preamps - all with the same general results.
Actually I don't understand what the fuss is all about with Naim amps, they introduce too much of their own character for my liking.

I would like to see the Soneteer schematics though!!
 
OK I will contact Sonneteer later tonight, but dont hold your breath,

As most people are aware NAIM is one of the handful of companies in the world, that try and at least bring out the musical emotions from cd's and lp's - Albeit lacking in many other areas. I understand from others that Rega,lfd, revolver,Linn Sondek, plus NEAT/ Kudos/ audionote/exposure in my experience all try and 'make music', but none like Sonneteer in my experience so far.
 
I have received a reply fom the designer, and as suspected every single component and circuit board layout is finely tuned by ear. A change in just one parameter may need a change in a whole lot of other areas to bring back the magic. So S-man is right in all his predictions. I wonder how the Unico P would compare to the Alabaster. Having lived with valves most of my life, I crave for that nth degree of transparency, timbrel truth, three dimentionality. Would the Unico hit my button?? I have tried a favoured long tried and tested valve pre in front of the Alabaster and the results were disastrous, I also tried a LDR passive and this also was disastrous. I of course used the direct input with the vol pot at max, thats close to zero resistance right??? So this makes it a very interesting amp indeed. I can conclude then that the whole is far more important than the bits making it. That would be as finely tuned an amp as you could possibly get, unless of course there is a major electrical mismatch with the preamps.
 
Interestingly, I have now got hold of the Sonneteer Byron CD player. Similar to the Alabaster in that it seems to be so very finely honed, that it will not tolerate any aftermarket gimmick after it. e.g valve and solid state buffers. Every other cd player i have used i have been able to improve or change the characteritics of for the better by using these sorts of aftermarket gimmicks. Its sound , well it is analogue like rich, emotive, fullsome in tone and in tonal timbres. A sound so unlike any other cd player i have ever witnessed. NAIM CDS, cec tl-0, audionote t2 and dac 4.1, pink tiangle da capo, tda 1541, 1543 and 1540 machines of various diy and ready manufactured versions etc etc. It makes you wonder about the authenticity of others with so called PRAT. You have to hear it to appreciate what i mean. You cannot claim it lacks PRAT whilst geting everything else right, because it produces an emotional response in a way that I'm simply not use to. It draws you in with a smooth relaxed but highly detailed sound, that is never lean and never soft or overblown. It captures instrumental and voice textures like few others. Perhaps more akin to a TDA 1540/1543 but better both emotionally and in detail.Although the foot tapping department might not be in the NAIM league (even then i belive i need to play with cables before this statement can be verified), you do at points wonder if the speed produced by such players is slightly overhyped, and a little bit more than what the musicians wanted. However, the only way to be absolutely sure is to get a non biased musician and let them tell you what the true tempo should have been of a recording played on these machines. Any musicians out there use any of these machines, and do they mimic the PRAT sound they worked for and recorded at??
 
Forgot to mention, so that the thread keeps to its theme, I think the point i'm trying to make is that Sonneteer products are so finely tuned be it at the componet level, or circuit layout, that any small change in any of the componenentry is likely to completely collapse the wonderful sound equalities they have, so there probably is no point in tweaking in them.

But i just can't resist the idea of just perhaps changing one or two of those cheap power caps for some slimics???? Slimics are supposed to sound musical arnt they ???
 
I'd say leave it well alone. Personally don't like silmics. Buy yourself a cheaper 2nd amp to have a play around with! Or build one from scratch and put whatever you want in it!
 
I've been bashing on about this amp for years, it is simply magical in its sound, there is absolutely no need to fiddle with little beauty.
 
agreed I will leave well alone


I will tell you what else is interesting in my mind. Without any knowledge of the Byron i got the VAlab DAC which used the sdame?? akm 4395 dac. Surprisingly had great PRAT and transparency far superior in that respect to the tda 1543 nos versions. The latter i have built with valve output as well as with multiple dac output etc etc and the characteristic sound is always the same. A little slow and off with the PRAT but organic warm natural tonal colours. Just not musical sounding enough to have the magic whichever way you put it together. I did remove from the Valab akm dac the opamp output amp/filter stages and this cleaned things up a bit, but still no magic.

I used the valab with the SHIGACLONE transport- superb transport best i have ever owned and built - very easily built. See DIY AUDIO. I agree it really is the equivalent of the CEC TL0 in terms of sound quality.

Now i do believe the BYRON USES THE SAME DAC, yet the VALAB has no where near that analogue tonality and timbral detail of the Byron IMO. So I used the transport section of the Byron and the VAlab and the sound was essentially as per the VAlab. So the Byrons magic is in the DAC implementation. I believe the Shigaclone is superior to the sony transport used in the Byron, and testiomony to its lack of importance ??? is that Sonneteer have had to use different transports according to availability.


How could i possibly get the shigaclone digital output and marry that to the DAC section in the Byron??? In other words i would not mind trying to get an external transport input connection into the Byron DAC. Any suggestions??

Just need to locate the input to the spdif receiver???
 
Hi all, I thought i'd drop by to say hello!

Over the years we have had a few enthusiasts modding the amp and a fair few came back to us to put it back right after they have listened to an original one next to it again!

I am not saying no other component change could improve our products, but to me that's not really what it is all about. Say if we start with Slimics, and that was the only power caps available, I'm confident by repeated cycles of listening test and modifications to other areas we would probably end up with the same sounding product as the Alabaster! So in the end what you like about our product is basically liking what we want our products to sound... if you stick a component in our amp and realise you no longer liked the sound, it only means the amp became a different products which you dont like lol... :p

I also read with great interest your post about the Byron... Yes the Byron DAC was designed to be fairly transport independent. It had to be like that because for a small manufacturer like ourselves mech suppliers comes and goes and it would be wise to make sure the Byron sound signature can be maintained with certain degree of ease. Even so, we have found each time we changed mech we had to adapt the mech electornics a little to keep the magic alive.

All the best
Remo

p.s. and no, the Byron doesn't use the 4395 ;)
 
nice to see you on here remo!!!

was chatting about you guys the other day.
do you remember greg from the speaker maker solid8 - acoustic solution.
he said he was very happy using your amps at a show years ago.....
good luck with everything.
darryl.
 
Hi Darryl,
Thanks for the welcome!!! Yes I do remember Greg, how could I forget he was so driven!!! I remember the Solid8s too from conception to production.... often wonder what is he doing these days!!!
Cheers
Remo
 
Remo thanks for your input. Everything you have said backs up what i have found, that the units are so beautifully balanced that nothing including external valve or solid state buffers, transformer impedance matchers etc etc improve the sound and indeed are mostly and immediately detrimental to the sound. I even by-passed the sonneteers so so 'cheaply priced' pot with a so called high end design and the whole sound immediately collapsed. Yes so so very beautifully and very FINELY balanced for the perfect sound. These findings are just so unlike any other component I have owned before, which nearly always responded to a little bit of tweaking one way or another.

I have now ordered the Sedley and will report back soon to see if it has the same wonderful muscial qualities as the Byron and Alabaster.

I can see now why you have never felt the need to have to replace models since their introduction.
 
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