Once downstairs, the final sonics are best described as quintessentially inside out, not outside in. Gear dialed for maximal separation approaches listening from the outside in. It works like a microscope or surgeon's scalpel. It operates. One goes over there, from the bigger to the smaller, from the periphery to the center. The OBX-RW3's focus on big warm tone, rotund bass and a very meaty attitude with temporal fluidity flipped this perspective inside out. Be it bravura Baroque with some Hungarian gipsy stylings from ace violinist Nemanja Radulovic or…

… a modern Greek song from laiki legend George Dalaras with "To Aspro mou poukamiso";

… be it some fat-fingered Manouche-style small-scale Jazz with the John Jorgenson Quintet on the Ultraspontane album…

… or the same genre with roaring Big Band and electrified strings compliments of Romane and the Frédéric Manoukian Orchestra….

… this gestalt didn't waver. It made tonal mass, color intensity and inside-out transmission the fulcrum whence everything expanded out into a bigger picture.

That meant away from down-to-the-bone separation, airiness and other elements often equated with 'hi rez' where the qualities which Kevin's aesthetic celebrates tend to get leaner, paler and thinner. His approach had the music come over here where I sat in my white chair with red sheep skin. For that to happen, I simply couldn't use the FirstWatt amps. In conjunction with our DHT linestage, that recipe overdid things. Like upstairs, the ideal solution was to administer the valve flavor in the small-signal domain, then have it pass transparently through the requisite current gain of a wide-bandwidth amp with very little self sound.