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Whilst Stuart had the measurements to prove perfect linearity, I hadn't yet fully gotten on with his mighty monos. On all of my own speakers they'd seemed a bit stuck in first gear. Think burly V12 engine forced to crawl down a wintry driveway at 2mph. I had bodybuilder beef aplenty but no chiseled competition articulation or striated 'pop'. Once the MV One packed it back for France, I reset my internal bar. I returned to my favorite speakers of soundkaos Wave 40 driven from the Crayon amp. My usual SOtM/Metrum Hex source fed the Nagra Jazz. Then the Jazz exited and the Esoteric C-03 took its place to remind myself of the differences seeing I'd also use it on the Oz blocks. Once my sensory compass sat dead north again I swapped in the EL30m.
SOtM, Metrum Acoustics, Nagra, Crayon Audio

Finally I had traction. Apparently the amps had landed virgin or at best partially cooked. During their opaque period the 0-xover widebanders had responded best. With sufficient mileage I now had the right stuff also on my Swiss eggs. But some personality remained to justify the prior 'getting there' tale. That's because remnants remained. No longer flaws their magnitude now was the stuff of usual hifi commentary. Where my Crayon and Bakoon amps are Sennheiser HD800 or HifiMan HE-6 headphones (quick, lit up all over) and my FirstWatt SIT1 MrSpeakers Alpha Dogs (mellower and richer but not as fat as the Audeze LCD-2), the SGR were AKG K-702 driven by April Music's Eximus DP1 with bass boost 'on'. If you're a headfi case that tells all.
SOtM, Metrum Acoustics, Esoteric, SGR Audio
If you're not—sadly most audiophiles aren't—you need more. The EL34m were slightly damped and as such drier than the more gushing fleeter Crayon. First off they had serious pit. That's how Hannover's celebrity clarinet professor Hans Deinzer referred to proper blackwood tone. In German pit is Kern. Think peach pit. It also means center. Now envision a juicy peach with its pit removed. It'll be hollow in the middle. As such it's without a center no matter how shiny and rosy on the surface. So the EL30m had big pits. The American 'ballsy' relates but doesn't quite express the same nuance. Two, fine harmonic spray coming off plucked strings which were left to ring out freely was less apparent. That subtracted a bit of surface gloss. The Crayon's hero shot of our peach photographed it sprayed with water. Its surface glistened to reflect light. The EL30m captured the same scene but of a dry peach. Despite unchanged lighting this rendered it a bit more dull.
If you extrapolate from this imagery our perception of audible space, light reflecting off an object becomes an echo or aura that creates context of its surroundings. The Australians did less of that. This was back to my opening gambit. Here not there, materialism not space. What had mellowed a lot was severity. The earlier darkness and heaviness had evaporated. Only a mild personality or shallow imprint of these aspects remained. Favoring a quick very lucid sound I thus still preferred the transistor over the tube preamp, the Metrum Hex over the AURALiC Vega converter and PureMusic over Audirvana to bypass iTunes. Someone with inherently lean speakers should want them loaded up fully but these monos on their own go a long way already.


Wrap. Accounting for the possibility that in my low-watt usage SGR Audio's EL34m never fully let 'er rip, I'd peg their key virtue as a slightly dry highly damped sound that practices saturation not primarily on tone color but tone substance. That differs from raw mass. Like the proverbial wall of sound, sheer mass gets ambiguous, vague and ill-defined. These monos were anything but. Each tone was simply the antithesis of hollow. I believe it's this very quality which leads some to proclaim that one can never have too much power. It's a grounding/anchoring action. As such it moves in the opposite direction of illuminated, airy, effervescent and sparkly. It's about a very robust material reading as though a phantom in the opera had dialled up a secret hereness control. Surprising for such high power—derived from massively paralleled output devices—this quality didn't exhibit lag to only kick in at tall volumes. It was evident out of the gate.


Immaculately built; quite macho as half casing, half heatsinks; dead quiet both mechanically and electrically; brainy with comprehensive auto monitoring; green with an auto-on feature... the 'check' list here is long. On sonics SGR's mid-power monos—where 'mid' is a euphemism for 300wpc except there's also a 600-watt whale—are no lumbering brutes though they did fake it at first. With proper run-in they turned out to be highly sophisticated. A terrific pairing with 94dB single-driver widebanders was completely unexpected. It very decisively showed how the core qualities of this circuit extend into fleaweight loads. Should the same hold true for the heavyweight class of big 3- or 4-way towers with complex reactive behavior and wicked phase angles, owners of Rockport, Magico, Wilson & Co. speakers ought to be on alert and pencil the name SGR Audio next to Gryphon and Vitus Audio. I couldn't report on this arguably key appeal because I fancy simple two-ways with a subwoofer. This makes my report a mere introduction to a brand from Down Under most of us never heard of but clearly should. So raise your glass and say hello to SGR!
PS: Edgar Kramer on staff has already agreed to a follow-up in 2014 to report on these amplifiers with more demanding speakers in a bigger room..
SGR Audio website