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Parameters taken into consideration besides sonic excellence were commercial reliability and customer service, which are of paramount importance at these prices; build and finish; and lastly and crucially price-value ratio. This is a minor consideration or major encumbrance for most professional reviewers but all important to the consumer. As concerns commercial credibility and customer care, my experiences with Nagra recently recounted in the Letters section have been wholly satisfying while fit and finish of both amplifiers are world class. Purely from the standpoint of construction ingenuity the 300p must be considered superior as attested by Srajan’s photos.
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On the downside turning this amp off lightly thumps the speakers, a minor black mark in my opinion since the very high voltage VPAs are literally deadly silent. Operation for both amps is plug and play with perfect bias out of the box. This leaves all-round performance and price-value considerations as the defining parameters.
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First things first. Because of rational speaker matching the 300p’s lower power figures—20 watts per channel, whatever that may mean, to the VPAs’ 50—did not come into the picture. Even the obdurate Harbeths never pushed the meters (modulometers in Nagra’s stolid speak) beyond 5 watts, this at listening volumes appropriate to the recordings played in a largish and quite reflecting venue. All right, but how do they sound?
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I must note that I've had sufficient experience with pentodes and beam tetrodes, everything from ECL82s to KT88s, but no truck with 300B triodes despite living some seven years with the big 845s. I was somewhat disconcerted then when my initial impressions pointed to a likeness which went well beyond the Nagra family sound, alliteratively annotated as clear collected and most of all coherent. To amplify—third pun in a row—a bit: when paired with an appropriate load, the VPAs are above all unflappable in their ability to create a vast sonic picture with absolutely no emphasis on any frequency band particularly in the mid and low bass regions. They materialize and then disappear either gradually or quickly in perfect obedience to the recorded signal, always keeping in mind that bass evaluation is room dependent.
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By the same token the excellent microdynamics translate as an extremely low noise floor in the mids and highs with no trace of etching or sterility, the final result being best described as sunlit with all the natural warmth and clarity the term implies. That said, for the first 2 hours or so I simply could not find any significant difference between the two amps to the extent that I would have been unable to single out one or the other with any great certainty in a blind test. Well, at least that’s a lot of money saved I thought at one stage since I wasn’t going to cripple myself financially for a duplicate.
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