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Basics. For roughly equivalent coin in Europe, the Athena and LS-100 represent very different concepts. To niche maker TruLife Audio the Athena is a very basic model. This clearly shows. For ModWright's far more developed mainstream infrastructure, the LS-100 dazzles with features and one of the handsomest chassis imaginable. There's balance control, remote input switching, HT bypass, headphone output and an optional 24/192 async USB/coax DAC board. Dan Wright's IR remote also advances/decreases volume in smaller increments than Velissarios' RF wand which skipped over values available by hand. It's all a landslide victory for ModWright.
Sovtek signal tube
The Athena is hardcore audiophile. It's about sonic purity from very specialized transformer craft and circuit minimalism. To pursue that path I set up ModWright and TruLife into the FirstWatt SIT1 monos driving AudioSolutions' flagship Rhapsody 200 speakers. Source was my usual Esoteric/APL Hifi UX1/NWO-M with Audiophilleo 2 USB receiver powered from Bakoon's uninterruptible BPS-02 battery supply. Polarity inversion was countered with Audirvana's software.

First up was my virgin copy of Gerardo Núñez' new Travesía [ACT 9534-2]. It translates as Crossings. I'd first heard three of its tracks on Spotify to chase down a proper disc on Amazon. Gerardo's liner notes set the proper mood: "I wanted to tell a story, one about my friends Ahmed and Khaled who fulfilled their dream of emigrating to Europe, that 'El Dorado' which ended up being gold leaf. They made a long journey through the desert to embark on another hard journey through the sea and yet another and another, moving further from their origins. Then I realized that my own story was also one of a journey and I remembered the poem of Luis Rius, "Every time I start to walk toward myself I lose the way, I go off course". I wanted to tell a story and the story told me."


If for argument's sake we were to postulate that transistors focus on transients and tubes on decays, the Athena played against that notion. On that count the 6H30 acted like transistors. Atmospherically the 6SN7 was noticeably wetter. More resonant and redolent, it sounded as though the recording venue's RT60 figure had been increased for greater elasticity and reverb. The 6H30 felt more damped, then countered with more leading-edge definition. Texturally speaking and not on tonal balance, the LS-100 was warmer, the Athena cooler.

RFT EZ81 rectifier
Different wording calls the Athena quicker and wirier, the LS-100 more languid and softer. Since our ear/brain uses transients to map sounds, the 6H30s had the advantage of depth relief in the 3D department. For the very silvery flamenco guitar of Núñez which in the 9-minute "Travesía" title track morphs seamlessly in and out of Brazilian-flavored salsa this meant more arpeggio steel. On choral song like Tekameli's chants sacrés gitan [Escolteu, Jade 6996542] with its pre-commerce Gypsy Kings roots this meant starker separation of overlays. For Jacques Loussier's solo piano jazzing up Chopin [Telarc], his signature high recording quality in wet acoustics meant more pearlescent articulation. The flip side was a minor drift into glassiness for certain upper-register exploits. My private term is the tinkles.
 

As a result Loussier's percussive riffs had more cayenne sharpness with the Russian 6H30, more honied legato beauty with the Chinese Psvane 6SN7. Again it was a matter of textures, not tonal weighting. Just so it'd be perfectly accurate to say that spatially the Athena was the more lit up. It had the greater number of lights brightening up the virtual stage. Meanwhile the ModWright's shadow play was richer and more romantic. Relative to another private term—the spiderwebby stuff—the Greek preamp likely enjoyed an even lower noise floor. This again helped the depth domain and staging drama with more articulated layering and 'hearing the recorded wall'.


Where these qualities of higher magnification power pooled together well was during low-level sessions. I found the ability to listen at relative whisper levels quite heightened with the Athena. For apartment and townhouse dwellers that's an asset not often enough talked about. When our natural impulse to prime the pump is in standby because everything is perfectly self evident to prompt no volume zooming, it's due to lower noise floors, greater detail capture and higher dynamic expression.

At stout levels and with declining recording quality, the same attributes—quickness, transient fidelity, 'self damping'—could lead to less pretty results when mated to my ultra-quick wide bandwidth single-stage amps. Here the ModWright's more languorous take and watercolor transitions were the more forgiving. As such they also were more practical or realistic. Still in this system context, the obvious question became, why not eliminate the 6H30 altogether? If it really behaved more like a transistor than tube, why not run with bona fide solid-state? This called for Esoteric's C-03 to take the ModWright's place. Afterwards I'd partner the Athena with different amps to find its sweetest spot. Its maker designs valve amps after all. The ideal sand amp was probably something a bit cuddlier like ModWright's own KWA-100SE.
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