Playing crowning altar glory atop my dual 15" cardioid subwoofer astride Hifistay decouplers, this next image drives home the amp's hulk aspect. Plugged into my new secret weapon of Kinki/Vinshine Tai Hang DC blocker, the Slovakian wasn't just quiet for a big amp, it played dead. I heard nothing with my ear on the drivers, nothing with my ear on Canor's top cover. Zdenek Brezovjak wasn't kidding when claiming that they'd aimed at sterling S/NR. You can't do that when your amp hums mechanically or electrically. Canor's circuit even banishes any turn-on burp or power-down fart. Whilst you may call those basics—so would I, actually—if they aren't licked as so often they fail at, just how much attention do we think a design team lavished on the subtleties? With equal excellence of fit 'n' finish including glow central, Canor obviously work to standards others would be envious to match. Not for nothing do some high-profile brands outsource their production here. Hot damn, I felt irresponsibly late to this Canor party. Clearly this is a brand quite ahead of the game on a number of demonstrable fronts. Even the massive top plate doesn't ring. No need for mass dampers. And though it's a true heavy, with this build we won't cut our hands on sharp heatsinks jutting out. Virtus is too civilized for such nonsense.
Below is that show from the rear. To rope in an extra 6dB of voltage gain, I connected the Virtus S1S via XLR. With my back in good nick, it was time to hunker down in the sweet spot and lend an ear or two. Before we get to listening, the quality of double-boxed packaging and protective innards scored equally high. If Canor the brand are as inexplicably new to you as they are to me, where have we been? Never mind. Now that we crawled out from under that ignominious whatever, we can catch up with Canor's biggest and best transistor amp. At close to €20K with average EU tax, it's no lightweight on wallet wince so has big expectations to fill. I thus parked myself in the chair, feet propped up, volume set to my liking. Et voilà, sound. But check Google translator for that word in Slovak. It offers up ten different nouns for sound. I felt like an Irish country bumpkin. He's seen snow once. Now he chews the fat with an Inuit who has well more than ten words for the white stuff to differentiate textures, wetness, temps, colour, size and a lot more. So let's break down the sound I heard Virtus make like an in-on-it audiophile. If the Inuits can do it for snow, we should be able to do it for sound.
In some spy flicks, our super-observant hero returns to his office and notices one thing on the desk slightly out of place. He's been rumbled. Someone's been there. By reviewing for a living, it's like that for me with things that make more of a difference like amplifiers and speakers. I nearly always notice that someone's been in my office. That needn't mean I can't find the bass, mids, treble. They're all obvious. But it can mean that I don't find complete satisfaction when it's no longer my exact layout. Some people purchase a hifi then get used to it. Others consciously curate it to conform to their sonic concepts. I'm that type. I notice even little deviations. Depending on what those move, I might have a harder time to still want to listen when the new balance goes against my grain. In the big scheme of things, that can take surprisingly little. When the Canor replaced my Kinki monos, that didn't happen. The Virtus did move things just a bit but not enough to cause alienation. It didn't evict my basic aural attitude or gestalt. Happy days. I'd be in no hurry to rebuild my status quo. Now let's compare by contrast to that. Before we do, the coin toss. At time of writing, $3.7K bought you a pair of my Sino amps. For the change of a single Slovak champ, that meant four pairs and money left in the till. And no, the big boy—though little bigger than my monos side by side—didn't perform in a higher league. It was as sterling but of a slightly different shade. With that ticked off and potential coughs swallowed, onward and up with just a passing thought: as they do for their best valve amps, might Canor have played even better to popular perception and pricing were the S1S split out into twin chassis to take the dual-mono concept all the way? When critics find nothing to critique, our sort gets creative. And to close the money detour, Kinki's pricing reflects their online store and PRC manufacture. Some buyers will never buy Chinese nor shop direct. They want an in-store audition, potential in-home trial privileges and EU-based support for eventual repairs. By adding all that plus EU manufacture, the price sadly doesn't double but quadruple. Don't blame the messenger.
Rubato is a musical term of Italian origins meaning 'stolen time'. It describes expressive shifts of tempo. Kinki's time keeping had subtly more of that temporal elasticity vs Canor's more metronomic rigour. This was a rather fine not gross distinction. It also mirrored slightly softer vs harder tonal beginnings. Was it a basic Mosfet x bipolar trait? I don't have enough experience with the matter. My favourite amps from Kinki, LinnenberG, Reverchon-era Goldmund and Nagra all drive lateral Exicon Mosfets. I somehow got stuck on their microdynamic finesse and subliminal flexibility. With this perception of music's progression through time, we feel into gestalt. What core quality does music's motion express? Does it dance? Is it pressurized like a locomotive, tensioned like a bow, jittery like a chased rabbit? Such assessments drive objectivists crazy. Yet for those sensitive to timing and phrasing, it's very real. It's at the core of fluidity x control. Both are key terms of the audiophile vocabulary. One suggests freedom, the other discipline. Whilst seeming purely subjective, one need merely listen to über-feedback class D which renders the musical cadence clipped and mechanical. Gush clamps down, control becomes paramount. There is often a link to microdynamic nuance and nano emphasis but if there was in this instance, it was too subtle to be sure. What exactly caused this minor shift of feel I can't break out better. I can merely add words like pliancy, even buoyancy. Again, this wasn't coarse enough to impact my enjoyment. It was just sufficient to notice a shift in feel which a number of tracks confirmed. To appease the objectivists, we could perhaps call it slightly more control for the Canor?
