Anyone out there own or have owned a Silvercore amp? What was your impression and their strengths/weaknesses?
I realize that probably no one outside Europe has any idea what company I am talking about so here is a link for reference.
AMPS – Silvercore
Hi there - jusrt did a random search for Silvercore and saw this post. Probably the response is far too late for whatever you were asking for, but I've been living with, and loving, a pair of Silvercore 833MKII monoblocs for the last three years.
Compared to other low powered SET designs, the Silvercores have a lot of 'meat on the bone' and offer quite a saturated sound. They still absolutely have that transparent, soulful and sweet SET virtue but there is more robustness to here. The bass is full and rich and with a decent amount of punch but again, it is SET bass, not SS. Still, I've never felt they were light in the pants; just lots of lovely tuneful if slightly rounded bass Finally, they have a silver wound transformer in them so as you would expect, they are quite bright in the mid range but never brittle or harsh. I've lived with them playing into a pair of hORNS FP10S and have just moved up the speakers significantly to the much larger FP15 big brothers. Both speakers are 96db rated so the 20 watts the Silvercores generate are more than enough. The FP10s are quite dark sounding speakers though, whereas the FP15s are much more neutral and so the ever so slightly bright mid range became more apparent. This was easily fixed by some tube rolling in the pre-amp.
I love them and since I've owned them I have had a few radically different alternatives in for comparisson. The best amps I have had, and which got closest to being good enough to warrant seriously considering a swap, were Concert Fidelity ZX120s (I have the CF 080LSX pre amp that matches them). These were a MOSFET design with 120 watts available but with the first 30 watts biased to pure Class A. They were so very different with that characteristic bass slam and more punchy leading edge dynamic, but they lost overall choherence and musicality. If I only ever listened to hardcore industrial, electro, techno, dance music, then it would be an easy decision to swap to the SS designed amps, but i don't and in the end the trade off was more than I would have been prepared to give up. That said, the test revealled two things to me.
First is that for SS designs they were quite fabulous. The second is that for the money, the Silvercore 833MKIIs are a complete bargain. The new price of the 833s is £12k in the UK (Inc. VAT), whereas the Concert Fidelitys cost £18k; the Silvercores are punching way above their weight in terms of price.
I've also heard them compared against the £40k Audio Music 833s, the big ones with the separate power supply chassis and between the two I would still choose the Silvercores although the Audio Musics were also very good. But then they cost 3.2 times more!
