Tag Archives: Valve

China delivers. Again.

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Hello!

The tubification of the household continues. After the introduction of one of Aric Audio‘s pre-amplifiers to the livingroom’s audio chain I was on a roll: what I needed now was similar tubey, valvey goodness for the man cave upstairs. I already had a lovely little pre-amplifier from the nice man at BTE-Design and another chunky Marantz SM-80 to drive the rather power hungry KEF LS-50s, but what was missing was a DAC that could deliver tubey, valvey goodness and decode the bits and bytes coming from the computers in the man cave.  Many audio forums were scrutinised, hours were spend on ebay, and in the end the Xiang Sheng DAC 01-A, a tube DAC and headphone amp was chosen. Recently updated with a new XMOS-U8 USB interface supporting DSD64 and 128, this was future proof for more high res music and backwards compatible enough to play my old 128k MP3s from 2001. Doukmall from Ebay again delivered on time and on budget and for £150 there was really not that much risk.

As promised, ten days later a package from China arrived, direct from the manufacturer,  XiangSheng Electronic Co in Hefei. DHL get around, don’t they?

Well packaged, with a moderately readable instruction booklet its compact and has loads of inputs:

USB, optical, coax and two analog inputs. The outputs are straight analog or tube enhanced.

Sorry, didn’t have a banana at hand.

If you want to, you can open it up and switch the jumpers to turn it into a pre-amp instead, rendering the headphone amp obsolete. Xiang Shen’s custumer service was quick to help with any questions and the unit has been working faultlessly ever since it arrived. To play higher resolution tracks via the USB 2.0 interface, you’ll have to download XMOS’s driver which is ubiquitous on the net and which works well on Windows 10.  It sounds brillant, with significant improvement to my last DAC, even though that was significantly more expensive. Another win for China MidFi. I certainly bow to our new Chinese MidFi Overlords.

 

 

Adventures in Mid-Fi Valve Goodness

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As you undoubtedly know and vividly remember, I purchased a rather unwieldy and monstrous early nineties power amp last year: the glorious and terrribly powerful Marantz SM-80. Remember the beast? P1030333

Serviced and repaired by the impressive Mr Phil Good from PG Electronics (email me for the contact details) it turned out to be a veritable and lovely sounding chunky piece of rather uneconomic electronics. All it needed was a pre-amplifier.

Ha!

The choices are of course endless. One could go for a modern digital pre/pro and prepare ones household for Dolby Atmos, THX multiquadular systems or whatever modern home cinema sound setups are called these days. Or go back in time/back to your roots/back to life to re-introduce some stereo enjoyment in ones life. Having dabbled with tube harmonics before, I thought it might be a good idea to pair the SM-80 with a straightforward valve/tube pre-amplifier.

Boy, was I ignorant.

The current choice for people who don’t want to spend thousands of pounds on a tube pre-amp is ebay, who currently has literally dozens of choices of different chinese copies of classic tube-amps. DoukMall seems to be the current provider of choice, but you can of course spend thousands (and indeed tens of thousands) of pounds/euros/dollars on tube audio of your choice. But having read a few reviews of these clones of famous tube preamps of the past, I wasn’t sure whether I want to have one of them explode in my living room.

Here’s the moment were the lovely Aric Kimball comes to the rescue. Owner, proprietor and sole engineer at Aric Audio, he produces tube gear for people with slim wallets, all hand soldered on his workbench in Brimfield, USA. I have to admit that I was rather disinclined to prop up the American mid-fi industry due to their current obnoxious commander in chief, but Aric’s reviews were excellent and he was a pleasure to communicate with.

Ordered via email and paypal, the ‘Expression‘ arrived in time and on budget with a transformer adapted to UK’s 230V electricity. It has 4 RCA connects for line input and two RCA stereo outputs, giving you lots of choices for both inputs and outputs.

outside

That’s mine, during its testing phase. Picture by Aric Audio

innards

Proper point to point soldering here. No PCB boards. Picture by Aric Audio

So, out does it sound?

Impressive.

A buddy of mine and myself chose 8 tracks and compared it to my all digital audio chain, a Denon DBT 3313 and AVR-X5200 (good, solid japanese made mid-hifi). The analog and digital chain were seperated by a Beresford switch and hooked up to the very mid-fi Klipsch RF-52 II. We chose chamber music, symphonic classical music, electronica, acoustic pop, rock, female voices, male voices and jazz. Most of the tracks were from SACDs, but it didn’t matter what we played: the little tube pre-amp and the SM-80 blew the all digital audio chain out of the water. The biggest difference was soundstage: switching to the tube gear, the whole performance jumped forward into the room, with a much more palpable 3d aspect to the music. Highs were much more defined. I was a bit upset by that, as I genuinely thought that my Denon gear would much more hold its own.

Oh well, that’s psychoacoustics for you.

Summary: I am ecstatic with the new addition to the setup. It just shows that for a truly amazing piece of audio kit you don’t have to spend thousands of (insert Western currency here) to reproduce music to an utterly enjoyable level.