Pack a small trunk.  What will you fit? If you're Martin, a pair of speakers, a pair of disassembled stands and a few T-shirts all carefully wrapped for that sunny desert island vacation.

Copperish bronze tones abounded with bronze grills, toothsome Raal Ribbon wave guide and ovoid terminal plate. I'd never seen Kryo binding posts before. They were of very high quality, with a special thread taper that allowed very rigid tightening by hand.

Here we see the other bronze zone…

… bleeding through the carpet to show the initial setup with 37wpc Grandinote Shinai integrated. With a pure class A circuit of simple complementary push/pull transistors coupled through massive toroidal output transformers, this Magnetostatic® design emulates the fat big tone of 6SN7 triodes in the high-current domain with solid-state type damping factor and bandwidth of 2Hz-240kHz. Whilst on our regular speakers I found the effect too dense and thick particularly at higher SPL and/or on convoluted material, on the Vox 3f the same recipe registered as quite ideally dosed.

The combination of small widebander plus 360° ribbon tweeter created a roof-down cabriolet effect with unusually high presence/treble dynamics and very sunny extension. On the other end, the small boxer-engine woofers with their port loading reached low but naturally couldn't move the air which a 10-inch never mind 12" or bigger woofer would. Here the virtual collagen injections of the hot-running Italian amplifier very effectively cloned deep rich tube sound from transistors. That added welcome weightiness and sonic materialism in this bigger room.

As an initial taking of the pulse past the HifiDeluxe Munich show two weeks prior, this again was an unexpectedly meaty rendezvous. With Shinai due back in Italy, the Bakoon AMP-13R quickly took its place but that first combination certainly did the business. Needless to say, two compact cabs hoisted on skinny sticks in a space used to hosting tall four-ways made the room feel weirdly bigger and the ceilings higher. Don't discount the psychological effects of speaker-buying decisions.