Chip Stern's Best Rooms of HE2003

"These three-way speakers were driven to perfection by some very sweet sounding, surprisingly dynamic deHavilland tube gear: The thirty-watt per channel Aries 845-G SET monoblocks ($5995/pr), and the 6SN7 equipped UltraVerve preamp ($2995), with some very fancy silver ribbon PranaWire cabling from their Cosmos line upping overall resolution into Olympian realms of the economically daunting and the musically sublime. What made this audition such a particularly homey experience for me was Carl's use of a digital front end comprised of the Sony SCD-777ES SACD driving an California Audio Labs Alpha 24/96 Tube DAC - which just so happens to have been my reference front-end source for a number of years until the Sony went bye-bye, thus affording me a familiar, dependable ground zero with which to speculate on what I was hearing. This genially extended system easily handled everything I threw at it, with exceptional snap, crackle and pop, remaining clear, coherent and dynamic even when pushed to higher volume levels, to effortlessly portray a warm, capacious soundstage in this crappy little hotel room. The Alon Lotus Elite Signatures were just real easy to listen to and drive with these low-powered SET amps; silky, spacious and laid-back; oodles of ambient information, yet alive with full-bodied impact and midrange detail - an exceptionally musical speaker. Again, major props to the deHavilland amps for overall system synergy."

The page for this report can be found at http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/he2003chip/4.html

The complete report can be found at Chip Stern's Best Rooms of HE2003