I've posted this thread to try and tidy up my mess on the "your last listen" thread. It was lazy of me to post there. Just wanted more time with my music :D
Aaanyway. I've probably said enough already, but the thread is here for anyone who wants to see the pics and add any comments. I'll paste some of the narrative from my AoS post below to give an idea of my impressions.
What I'm hearing is remarkable. I'm not exactly at the top of the upgrade ladder with these NVA amps, but they are beating everything else on sound. Heck, I'm only using their cheapie speaker cable, but it sounds......well it sounds like the amps, like nothing at all. That's the thing. I've heard so many bits of kit others have described as "not getting in the way of the music" but the scale to which these just disappear is leaving me lost for words.
I've heard (and owned) many overtly "detailed" systems over the years but now I realise they weren't actually detailed at all. They all gave a false impression of detail, whilst having a stronger electronic signature than other bits. You're usually aware of using an electronic device to reproduce music. As mad as it sounds I'd swear these ran off something else, or actually weren't running off anything or weren't there at all, because a huge part of what I'd come to accept as an unavoidable part of listening to reproduced music has been removed.
I've got two valve amps here, a Puresound and an Apollon. I'm puzzled because I've compared the Puresound and my former Audio Innovations amps to the Krell KSA50 and KSA 80 and their sense of ease and space can't be matched by the big solid state amps. Conversely, they can't match the Krell scale. Well these tiny amps seem to outdo the valve amps at what they do best and sound far more like real music than the Krell ever managed.
I'm no stranger to NVA amps. I've owned the odd one (always 2nd hand) over the years going back to the 80s. They were always good amps but I've chopped and changed lots. Its actually unusual if I haven't owned something lol. These recent ones are the first acrylic cased amps I've used and this is the first time I've used NVA speaker cable. The results have really surprised me. It's early days, but you know pretty quickly when you've made a real advance and this time I have. I never expected it to come from removing rather than adding something to the sound but that's what I'm hearing. The smallest, least expensive amps, linked up by the cheapest cable I've ran in ages turn out to be the best. Who would've thought that possible? Not me but there you go. Just telling it like it is.
