This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below

Brick-à-brag. I really had no properly price-matched regular boxes for the main system. From her studio I'd borrow my wife's Boenicke W5 monitors on short stilts. To get going I'd start with my usual CHF18'700/pr soundkaos Wave 40. Swiss eggs on sticks I call those with affection. As per usual my big Zu Submission would sneak in below 48Hz for some subtle 1st-octave assist. Nobody would duplicate such a pairing in real life but it'd still tell me how the bricks would fare into standard-efficiency loads. The more extreme 81dB Primes had sadly hustled their stoner butts back to Finland by the time the Clones arrived. The gnarliest I could get were my AudioSolutions Rhapsody 200. Their impedance swings and underdamped twin-port loading replace low sensitivity as a potential amplifier stumbling block. Unless I have some ultra-low impedance amps of Ncore 1200 caliber on hand—Xuanqian's 'poor man's Ncore' called AURALiC Merak apply fully—I tend to tightly plug all four ports to counter bass boom. I fully anticipated that the 55pm would need those plugs as well. And since all this was good-natured horsing around, I parked an equine ceramic between the monos for scale.

Still on horse play, I kicked off replacing just my FirstWatt SIT1 monos. The Nagra Jazz stayed put to change only one thing at a time. Now to SPL. In my 5.5 x 12m space—hot seat about midway to put me at ~3m from the speakers—a solid 70dB with maximally 90dB very momentary peaks (most music today doesn't even have 20dB of dynamic range) is all my ears and the room will tolerate. I usually listen lower. With my 92.5dB eggs I thus consume 1/10th of a watt RMS and hit one solid watt at max. Really. That's measured fact, not wishful micro-power SET hinkiness. I thus really don't know what bad weed people smoke who claim 115dB peaks at home. Perhaps they live in mondo manses? If you live in my world... these li'l amps will have you fully covered.

That also goes for sonics. In the 'losses' drawer versus my transistor single-endeds went some stage depth, ambient detail and sweetness. In the 'shift' drawer went flavor which became pentode. To explain, take e-guitars pushed into heavy distortion. Because I despise that sound, I rarely partake. Even so a new Anna Marie Jopek live cut with Dhafer Youssef happened to go there. With the op-amps that clipped screaming was decidedly sharper and more strident than over my triode-mode Pass amps. And a bit of that incisive behavior translated across the board as keen separation and very clean outlines. Like with a good curry where no single spice should stand out, this wasn't a ring-the-bell foreground feature. It simply was less sweet and creamy than the SITs and more focused on stage contents than stage space itself.


Strong points for this flavor are high relief when strings like Aytaç Doğan's qanun or Gerardo Nuñez's guitar undergo tremolo; and crisp leading edges which impart articulation and firm beginnings. Fronted by small-signal tubes in the Swiss preamp, none of it clocked in as massive change. This pointed a happy stiffie at the taboo of widebanders and transistor drive (which would make lowly chip power with massive amounts of so-called 'current feedback' outright satanic). As with real-world SPL, that's another myth in need of inspection.

To get more real the Nagra exited and the AP1 took over. Because of high 30dB voltage gain for the Clones amp, I'd set the Jazz to 0dB gain. This gave me more range over its volume. Though the AP1's gain is deliberately low, it's still more than nothing. Here I never got much past 8:00 on its dial. 9 o'clock was flatly out of the picture. I'd prefer a far shallower taper to have the sweet zone bracket 12:00 or even 2:00. Sonically the op-amp pre was a bit of a shocker. Whilst the just described shift effect continued, it again was far milder than expected. I lost a bit of layering, elasticity and audibility of recorded space but pocketed €10'000 in change. What didn't happen? Any loss of substance. If that sounds all wrong—how could a lowly op-amp hang in this well?—my €10'000 Esoteric C-03 too performs its voltage gain with op-amps. The rest of it is bank-vault casing, trick remote, flexible gain, socketry, source switching with disconnected grounds, a big power supply and brand cachet. What we into costly hifi really do is pay disproportionately extra to sleep under a baby-down duvet with a 1000 thread count when a wool blanket would do. Do we sleep any better?

To stay the line between good-natured mockery and fact, the audible thread-count issue had to do with ambient recovery. The closer you sit to a live stage, the more direct the sound gets. It's loud, sharp and not mixed too much with the sound of the venue itself. Close-mic'd recordings mimic that by design. Whatever 'hall sound' the engineer wants is added with artificial reverb. A Waterlily Acoustics recordings of a Russian symphony captured with just two microphones meanwhile presents what an actual audience would have heard. There were no mics where no human ears would be (hanging off the ceiling, stuck into the bell of a French horn, hovering above the bridge of a cello). On albums with real space, the austerity measures which the Clones imposed for their everyman pricing was similar to moving the microphones up close. I heard less surrounding space for a starker reading with less connective tissue.

With the white Lithuanians rated at 91dB, the volume control sat at pretty much the same place for room-fill pressure. The shouldn't-be ticket came from being able to remove the port plugs. With more than 60 monos fitting inside the cubic volume of these 5-driver 3-ways, the visual disconnect was priceless. Because the Rhapsody's voicing leans toward vintage Sonus faber onto which is grafted a US-style bass balance with serious dynamics—slightly dark, warm, fulsome but butch—the Clones tuning matched like cheese and macaroni.


What I couldn't get over was their bass control. Had now I some bad weed? I'm certain that headbangers and 2-ohm brutes could eventually run the 55pm dry. I couldn't. Not even close. I was simply tickled that I had a solid €1'448 combo I could recommend highly for 'my' sort of speaker to anyone for whom something like the €4'250 Crayon Audio CFA-1.2 is out of reach. Though many Zuists insists that tubes are de rigueur, I think the Druid V and Clones trio would be a smoking match.

Because all of us have been so mistrained on what we think we need, skip to Matej Isak's short review of the Clones Audio 25pm here. He drove his Wilson Audio Watt/Puppy 7, Sonus Faber Olympica III and Ktema Accordo monitors with 'em. That's because the cloned trio doesn't take one wrong step. Yes it won't do a few advanced pirouettes, back flips and sundry but all the basics are there. And for once basics aren't derogatory or beginner's stuff. They're synonymous with all that which is vital to playback: substance, conviction, color, tone and differentiation. As I suggested on top of this page, these really are bricks to brag about.