#Amarra review stereophile driver#
#Amarra review stereophile full#
#Amarra review stereophile mods#

So I took the plunge, sold the Mac MR 71 and used the money to buy a new Bryston 4B SST2 with the latest mods and their DAC so that I could build a music server.

#Amarra review stereophile driver#

Granted Magnepan used the Bryston 28's (1000 watt mono blocks) versus the 4B's 300 wpc into 8 ohms, but all of Bryston's amps have similar driver sections and thus sound very similar, with slight incremental gains as one moves up the chain starting at the 4B level.įor me, the 3.7's driven by the Bryston 28's and 1.7's driven by the 4B was the best sound at the show and much better sounding than the 3.7's in the ARC room.

#Amarra review stereophile full#

So even if the Bryston was the weakest link, it was now darned good full range.Īt the last CES, I got to hear the latest iteration of the Bryston in two demo's, Bryston's and Magnepan's 3.7 demo. Granted I was feeding it with an excellent tube preamp using tweaked 6H30 tubes and HiFi Tuning Supremo fuse plus absolutely beautifully smooth and articulate Kubala Sosna interconnects. As I rebuilt my audio system, with a much keener eye for audio value for the dollar, I bought a used Bryston 4B SST from about 8 years ago and to my surprise found that the while the bass as good as ever, the midrange and highs had improved markedly to the point that I could easily be happy with the amp running full range.

Then divorce hit and all of my amps went bye-bye, as did everything else in my system, save for my trusty McIntosh MR 71 tube tuner that I owned for more than 40 years. That brought me back to Bryston for the bass, this time a pair of 7B monoblocks, which were superb for bass, but like before only quite good in the mids and a little less good for the highs. I then went on to own many amplifiers, both Class A and AB, tube and transistor and then migrated to bi-amped systems. It produced great bass, but was only quite good in the midrange and a bit transistor sounding in the highs. I bought my first Bryston product, a 4B amplifier back in the late 70's, which I believe makes it the second generation of this longstanding product that was the cornerstone of this amazing company. We offer them here for your delight and delectation.I have been a fan of Bryston products for years, but until recently, like many people, thought of them as best suited for bass applications. The results of a series of cable measurements he had performed seemed to confirm the Hawksford Hypothesis. English engineer Ben Duncan, whose writings have occasionally appeared in Stereophile, sent me an article he had written for the pro-audio magazine Studio Sound. In his article Malcolm described a simple experiment, the results of which appeared to confirm his hypothesis.

Among the predictions of this model were that for good conductors there exists an optimum size of wire for audio signal transmission, and that for a wire larger than this size an energy storage mechanism would exist. (Photo: Naomi Swain).Įditor's Preface: In an article in the October 1995 issue of Stereophile, Professor Malcolm Omar Hawksford used Maxwell's Equations to develop a mathematical model describing the behavior of cables at audio frequencies. The resulting proof of RF rejection was published on-line by Russ Andrews Accessories in England. Testing the RF transmission of Kimber Kable, up to 3GHz, at Ben Duncan Research Labs, in 2008.