Refinement or Raw, Which Amp Signature Wins for You?

[Kofi Baffour]

I’ve been shifting between a few high-end amps, and it’s funny how each one sends you down a completely different path. One gives you that musical cohesion and refinement that pulls you in, while another goes all in on dynamic authority and transparency, the kind that makes you hear things you weren’t even sure existed. At the level of high-end amplification today, everything sounds top tier. Nothing feels compromised until you sit them side by side and the small differences start poking through. The real question: if you had to choose your path from the start, would you go for musical flow and finesse, or the full power package with maximum honesty, or have you found an amp that manages to combine both worlds?

Neutral. I want to control variables altering the frequency balance being only the speakers/room and DSP. Everything else must get out of the way or have negligible influence sonically. I want to hear my speakers not everything else

 

[SeagoatLeo]

A competent system must equally navigate the refinement of the sound of a string quartet and the raw visceral power and drive of Black Sabbath (not that a string quartet can't sound visceral either). And in orchestral music it needs to combine these elements to a satisfying maximal level.



A system that can't play at more realistic levels of 90 dB to 100 dB peaks would not be interesting to me as one that I would want to own.

With my huge and broad collection of music I feel the same way. I meter my music and it's in the 80db to 90db range most of the time with peaks up to 100 db. A harpsichord solo to Led Zeppelin and everything in between. Both my Von Schweikert and Legacy Signature IIIs easily achieve that. As a teen, I had dinky sound from a pair of Advents and small Infinity speakers driven by 20 to 30 watt solid state receivers in a 20X20X10 room. I would have been better off with Dynacos or ADS speakers in the 1970s.