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It again confirmed outstanding pace & rhythm with grippy timing. Another album waiting in the wings was a live concert of Aussie veterans AC/DC. These guys are human volcanoes of energy pumping out more and more with every second they're on stage. It is not possible to convey this amount of energy at home no matter how good the system is or how large the speakers might get. It is however possible to scale it down whilst retaining a good feel for what these guys were up to. It's not really about how loud a system will play sans compression or clipping. It's more about how much kinetic energy transfers from record to listener, how lively the reproduced sound is. Hence during my reviews I use this record a lot. Each time I play it and sit quietly in my chair, I know there's something wrong with the item under review. Because if it sounds right it doesn't matter how I feel, what time it is, how shitty my day was. Nothing matters. I get up from my chair and have fun. Only then a particular piece of equipment is doing pretty well.


This is easier for solid-state amps. This kind of music doesn't require sophistication or a smooth rich midrange but rather relies on brute force, dynamics, perfect rhythm and a bit of madness. Here most tubes are sorrily out of their depth. But the Entropy begged to differ. It gripped the speakers in a way that allowed sufficient energetic recreation, thunderous dynamics and the coarseness that has electric guitars sound right but at the same time also showed quite tube-like mids which made Brian Johnson's vocal clarity better than usual.

Knowing that the loaner wasn't shy on dynamics or driver control, I changed repertoire for music that usually plays well to valves. I started with a beautiful Kate Bush recording. Here everything revolved around her extraordinary voice and its presentation actually determined whether the recording sounded good or not. For me the performance is good when I close my eyes to see Kate dressed in some long robe dancing in the woods like a dryad. With the Entropy I could beautifully relate to Kate's timbre, tone and texture and visualize her in my room to know how well this amazing amp was doing.

Add to that the magical ambiance of wuthering heights and mysteriously dark sacred spots with wads of emotions as the most important elements of Kate's music. It is not possible to deliver all that without a wonderful rich smooth saturated midrange. The fact that the Entropy was able to do it reminded me of the Crossfire again. These amps can strike you with power and authority but when necessary charm you with 300B sweetness for a fantastic combination.

The Amare played all the old recordings I tried in the most amazing fashion, say Ella & Louis. These two voices—so different yet somehow similar in their uniqueness and brilliantly intertwined, tangible, crystal clear, vibrant and powerful —were shown with the same level of precision and thoroughness as Kate Bush's had before. Satchmo's trumpet showed its magic from sounding smooth and gentle to turning into a sharp even rough demon over a split second. In fact each time the Entropy played any acoustic instruments they showed 'tube-like' colors, smoothness, beautiful timbre, tangibility and holography which only high-quality tube decks offer. All that came very close to what I remembered from my session with the top-line Amare separates. Whilst the 300B triode even further fine-tunes the midrange, it usually comes at the cost of somewhat curtailed extremes. Amare Musica amplifiers including the Entropy are more versatile. They do present the midrange with particular care but the same goes for the treble and bass. In the summary of my De Forest/Trinity review I'd opined that they offered perhaps the best treble I'd ever heard not only from a tube amplifier but any amplifier, period.


I did not mean that this set favored that part of the frequency spectrum but that it presented it in a remarkable way still perfectly integrated with the rest. And it was the treble which showed the biggest difference between the Entropy and De Forest/Trinity set. Now the treble was really good but not as brilliant. It's hard to tell if it was done on purpose but the fact is that the sound of Entropy is very consistent. We get an open vibrant detailed treble, just not as rich as the top model's. It is nicely extended and there are no rounded or sharp edges which in the case of a tube amp is quite the achievement.


Haydn's Les sept paroles dernières ... is one of my favorite recordings when it comes to assessing space & holography. This proved beyond doubt that the Entropy was a genuine valve machine. It delivered an amazingly huge three-dimensional soundstage and tangible images as clearly the domain of high-quality tube amps. Listening to this recording I felt like a tiny little man sitting in a huge church overwhelmed by its vastness and the sheer power of some absolutely extraordinary music. It was an amazing experience and just the kind I expect whenever I sit in my chair and turn on my system. Flat response, nicely extended at both ends, no obvious downsides... it all allowed the Amare Musica Entropy to play all music in a fabulously engaging manner to give me an experience much more profound than just shuffling through some recordings by rote.