Tonal balance vs detail density. Maurizio Atterini's INT-1000 and Simon Lee's AIO are class A/B p/p Mosfet circuits. This transistor type is often claimed to be closer to tube sound than bipolars. That's when tube sound means warm softness. Former Stereophile contributor Sam Tellig dubbed it Mosfet mist. It's more romanticized scenery than harsh light of day. On that misty score, the South Korean CD receiver was warmer/thicker. It threw up more image density with more feathery edging. The Italian's slightly leaner tuning upped speech intelligibility. In our video-in-stereo setup that's Public Friend #1. If you can't follow verbal action, story-driven films shut down. Reach for action flicks instead. Let car crashes, ridiculous chases and slow-mo explosions do the talking. It's the equivalent of comic-strip speech bubbles. Kapouw. Boooom. Crrrrrackk. Smeshhhh.

Whilst the IT-1000 Deluxe brought subjectively keener resolution to the table, it didn't quite match the AIO's dynamic wallop. The latter is simply a double-edged sword with productions that teeter-totter between dialogue recorded too low and action mastered too hot. You set playback volume to follow the former then jump for the remote whenever the latter gets obnoxiously bombastic. It's not the hardware's fault. It can simply exaggerate questionable edits. Sadly the latter are quite common. Now Gold Note's slightly less exuberant dynamic behavior was actually preferable. It caused less twitch around the remote. Given how personal purchases warrant no in-depth reportage, I'll just add that with the Soul VI's boisterous reactivity to dynamic contrasts, our combination remains plenty twitchy. Bleeding out some opacity from the AIO's greater thickness now shines more light on what transpires in the all-important midrange. That has improved our ability to track even mumbled dialogue where misguided film makers conflate realism—that their actors can't bloody enunciate—for proper story telling and audience satisfaction. As much as tone is a function of amp rather than speaker endowed with a 10.3" widebander, our silvery Gold Note is the antithesis of the dry minor chalkiness of a certain class D amp in our inventory. The IS-1000 simply captures the harmonics of timbres without valve-emulator pastiche. Most modern amplifiers adhere to the straight-wire-with-gain ideal. Deviations from deliberate voicing or limits of implementation tend to play in C minor not major when compared to the unpredictable mess speakers cause in the time and frequency domains.

Thus minor applied itself to hearing differences between our prior and new amp in this simple video 2.0 system. They certainly didn't sound identical. Yet the difference was a lot smaller than comparing speakers. And that's how it should be unless one pursues amplifiers that are very strongly seasoned to obtain a particular effect. I wasn't. Neither was the Gold Note. Happy days!