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'twas time to roll transducers. How might the Australians fare into other loads? In my short-wall setup the Boenicke Audio B10 with their opposed side-firing dual 10ers became too bassy and dark. This was no surprise. They've done so before with bass-buxom amps. Then they really favor a long-wall layout with greater sidewall distances. So Roger Federer traded places with Stanislas Wawrinka. In moved my other Swiss, the soundkaos Wave 40. This very easy tonewood widebander—93dB efficiency, low-pass filtered, augmented by a Raal ribbon—worked well enough on overall gain but was robbed of projection power due to compromised harmonic finesse, fluency and vitality. The eggs now played it far drier, more damped and staid than is their trademark and why I acquired them in the first place. To my ears and in 1st-watt mode the very powerful EL30m with its many paralleled transistors erred in the exact same direction as April Music's ICEpower-based Eximus S1 had before. The sound was undeniably friendly, warm, robust and weighty.


By the same token it also was darkish and overly heavy. This damped upper harmonics and how they would otherwise parlay the energetic charge, tone modulations and microdynamic expressions good musicians labor over. A Mårten Design all-ceramic speaker model would likely have responded very well. So would Albedo's Aptica I'd already returned. In my resident stable I simply had nothing sufficiently frisky. My upstairs German Physiks HRS-120 are full-bandwidth true 360° omnis. They deliberately activate the ambient field for wet tone. Here the very quick and incisive DC-coupled wide bandwidth Job 225 is my favored weapon. Once again the SGR monos pointed in a different direction. That left one very unlikely option. For its own review I had the Davis Acoustics MV One on hand. This solo widebander had suggested an electrostatically lean quick whitish sound seriously shy on mass and curves when its designer had dropped it off. Could this mismatch on paper—high-power transistor monos, 94dB widebander—come together and kiss?

Never say never. It read all wrong but didn't sound it. The zero-filter reflexes of the proprietary 7" paper membrane with graphite outer and Latex inner skins, aluminum dust cap and Alnico 6 motor were the needed antidote to heaviness. Low-level listening was far better, deft articulation from percussive incision noticeably higher. From my choices I'd clearly hit upon my EL30m mate. G'day MV One! To leave no stone unturned, I next heaved my Esoteric C-03 preamp down the stairs. Set to 0dB gain it works as an actively buffered passive. This tends to have a mild accelerator action of the sort one expects of pure passives, albeit with none of their non-stabilized impedance issues.


Finally I added EnigmAcoustics' Sopranino super tweeter seeing how this widebander/amp combo lacked top-end air and brilliance. This put me on the home stretch for the checkered flag and into the heart land of my type of sound: lucid, crystalline, intelligibly modulated on tone, with great audible space and coming fully on song at already low volumes.


That a beefy amp clearly groomed for power could do this so well seemed remarkable. But then Marja & Henk on staff have gotten brilliant results teaming their Mola-Mola class D monos with 100dB efficient horn-loaded single-driver AER speakers for ages. To this particular party I was way late. At least I finally attended.

Stuart Ralston. "See graph below. The red line is with the amp loaded with 2Ω, deliberately lower than the minimum recommended load. Even at this very low impedance it is only -0.247dB down at 20kHz. Unloaded (green curve) it is just -0.08dB down at 20kHz. You will notice the nice smooth top-end rolloff also. The bass response of the amp does not change with load. Unloaded is the same as a 2-ohm load, being -1dB at 1.67Hz and a perfect minimum phase response. Damping factor at 20Hz is actually 2600 at 1W into 8Ω! The high-frequency response changes with load (as show below) because of the lower damping factor at high frequencies but even at 20kHz the DF is still 112 which is quite 'high'. So I'm not sure why you're hearing diminished top-end energy but I have one theory.


"Most amps have higher distortion in the top end caused by harmonic interference generated internally by the radiation from high-current lines. This could be interpreted as more top-end energy (which technically it is). Our amps don't suffer this because of the field-cancellation topology (FCT). Even at full power I can't measure any distortion increase. Could it be that the EL amps are actually cleaner than most other amps? The EL amps were initially developed to work with our active speakers which use the Scanspeak Revelator tweeter with extension beyond 30kHz. They have subsequently proven themselves on a range of speakers where other amps failed (Wilson Sasha, the Sonus faber etc). The two top responses I receive from listeners are "fantastic tight bass" and "great air". "*

* If one believes the Goldmund concept that an amplifier must have a minimum of 10 x the audible bandwidth in each direction to avoid phase shift, a 20kHz reach is in fact far from sufficient. 200kHz becomes essential. With three such wide-bandwidth amplifiers in house, I think there's something to this theory which translates into a more refined and illuminated top end.