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Fi: The Magazine of Music and Sound is a component that should be added to every sound system. Featuring the world's best writing on audio and music, Fi brings readers more of what really matters. For subscription information call (800) 779-HIFI (4434) or write to:
Fi: The Magazine of Music and Sound P.O. Box 16747 North Hollywood, CA 91615-97644 |
The Wavelength Napoleon by Jonathan Valin
Pity the poor single-ended amplifier. Like Gulliver among the Brobdingnags, it lives precariously in the land of giants-the big push-pull tube and solid-state amps that have provided gas, heat & power to the high end for the past two decades. For most consumers and the majority of reviewers the SE is little more than an expensive curiosity, a wind-up music box that tinkles softly and prettily, making sweet, pleasant, slightly dulling sounds. Only a few adventuresome souls regard it as something more than a toy--and they are typically horn-lovers for whom brute power is overkill.
Our own Dr. Michael Gindi recently penned an obit for the entire genre that was in certain ways more damning than the usual technical-based dismissals. For him, lowwattage SE's aren't merely incapable of bringing off the grand musical gestures-the fortes and sforzandos that take great reserves of drive and power to reproduce realistically-they are equally inept at limning low-level nuances, covering inner details up and over with a lovely but opaque veil of harmonic distortions. His criticism is blanket: dynamically and timbrally, SEs are not faithful to the sound or sense of live music.
Though we ultimately disagree, I will concede that Michael's appraisal is this far correct: in the majority of real-world applications, SE's don't fare well, if they fare at all.
We are used to thinking of power amplifiers as "all-purpose" tools, but SE's are application-sensitive in ways that just about every other kind of amplifier, save perhaps an OTL, is not. Like all zero-feedback amps, they need to see a relatively stable impedance that for a nominal 4 ohm loudspeaker doesn't dip much below 3 ohms, and for a nominal 8 ohm loudspeaker doesn't dip much below 6. But unlike other zero-feedback designs, single-ended triodes aren't just flustered by speed bumps in the impedance plot. The components in a speaker's crossover siphon off the limited power resoupces of SE's just as killingly as impedance drops do. In complex crossovers, power losses are compounded by the larger numbers or values of inductors, resistors, and impedance-stabilizing Zobal networks--each of which drains power by adding serial and parallel resistance to the circuit. The bottom line is clear: if you plan to use an SE, you must also plan to use an efficient speaker with a stable impedance curve and a relatively simple crossover. Absent same, you will never hear these amps at their considerable best. Which brings me to the product under review: the Wavelength Audio Napoleon single-ended monoblocks.
I guess I should say right off that the Napoleon is-when used with an appropriate speaker and when simply, elegantly, and inexpensively modified by Shun Mook-the most musically satisfying amplifier I've yet heard in my home. At reasonable levels it can reproduce anything and everything from floor-shivering pedal point to guitar or violin pizzicatos to fortississimo cymbal crashes to sforzando rim shots with nary a hint of compression, roll-off, or clipping. Given the best source materials, it can focus musical space and physical space in a way that makes both seem equally present-so that instruments are both "there" before you and "elsewhere" in the resounding hall where they were taped. Present tense and past tense are amalgamated by these amplifiers, with none of the usual struggle over which takes precedence in the presentation. All this from a mere eight watts.
I can see some of you raising your eyebrows. The Napoleons only sound so convincing in Valin's system, you are saying to yourselves, because Valin is using 100+ dB efficient horns. Sirs, I am not. The presentation I am talking about is coming from 89 dB efficient Shun Mook Bella Voces (which I will be reviewing, with pleasure, in an upcoming issue).The sound the Napoleons and the Bella Voces make--when driven by the nonpareil Audio Research Reference One preamplifier and, say, the FM Acoustic 122 phono stage preamplifier or Ensemble Dichronous transport and Audio Note Signature Four DAC--is, I repeat, in most ways, the most musically satisfying I've heard. I could live with it happily until the cows come home from wherever the cows go when they're out and about.
You may recall that I was not quite as sanguine about these amps when I wrote my sneak preview of them, some months ago. While i thought the Napoleons were surpassingly neutral and surprisingly strong, I had some reservations about their recovery of very low-level details. Thanks to Shun Mook and the Vaic Valve company, these reservations no longer stand. To take the latter first, the VV30B tube that I extolled in Issue 2-and that I was using in the Napoleons during my sneak preview listening sessions-is still an excellent sounding thing, stronger by l-to-2 dB on steady-state signals (referenced to 80 dBC SPLs) than a 300B. If you find yourself consistently coming up short on power in any 300B applications, the 30B is, perhaps, the one and only ticket out of Dilemma-ville.
At the time I reviewed the VV30B, I had not heard Vaic's version of the 300B. I have since, and would have to say that, power considerations aside, the VV300B is the marginally sweeter and more transparent tube. Just substituting it for the 30B made a small but significant difference in the retrieval of low-level detail.
More significant were the changes wrought by the Shun Mook team of Andy Chow and Dr. Tan Yu Wah, who have made modifying Wavelength amplifiers (the Cardinal and Napoleon) a cottage industry. For the Mookists, resonance is just about everything and it has been their object to remove or retune as many sources of same from the Cardinals' and Napoleons' chassis, circuit board, and transformers as they can. In the case of the Napoleons, this process amounts to the removal of the Sorbothane feet and most of the screws from the bottom panel, replacing the Naps' 3-amp slo-blow fuse with a carefully chosen, higher-value, fast-blo ceramic type, selectively applying Shun Mook pucks at key spots on the Napoleons' chassis and transformers, and setting the whole contraption on one-and-a-half-inch-square Canadian maple blocks. The net result of all these tweaks is a sweeter, measurably stronger, more transparent amplifier that has about it the ineffable ease of actual music making.
Now ease is something that we audiophiles don't often talk about, although we hear it all the time in life: the way dynamics swell and decay, the way harmonics bloom and linger. Instead we typically extol amps that are "hard-hitting," overlooking the fact that the realistic reproduction of music, even musical dynamics, doesn't just consist in lighteningfast transient response. Intensities grow, reach a steady-state, and then decay. Throughout this process, all sorts of other tiny changes are occurring--changes that directly affect the color and articulation of the notes. Unless intensities are allowed the duration to swell and decay naturally, these other changes get short-shrifted, with the result that every dynamic change becomes too much of a crescendo or decrescendo. This is one reason why very fast, "hard-hitting" amps are also often relatively threadbare in color and continuity, and why slower, less "hard-hitting" amplifiers, which may not have the same realistic speed of attack, are nevertheless richer in timbre and fuller and more continuous in articulation.
While the Napoleons do not have all of the authority of big tube amps or all of the speed of solid-state amps, they have something better: a taste of natural ease. Whether it is some distortions they are adding (as certain critics would have it) or whether, as I think, it is some distortions they are taking away, they seem to include bits of information in the dynamic and harmonic picture that other amplifiers just don't provide. No, they won't change an orchestral fortississimo into the crashing wave that it is in life. (No amp will.) But they will reproduce a mighty massed glissando like the one which breaks like sea spray across the bow of Ibert's Ports of Call [RCA3 with a sunstreaked gorgeousness that will take your breath away. They will change a sharply picked electric guitar like Drink Small's on "Stormy Monday Blues" [Mapleshade], into a solid-bodied semblance of the thing itself. They will pour forth a deep organ note like Dr. Lonnie Smith's Hammond B-3 on Organic Grooves (an infectiously funky album from HipBop) with a three-dimensional definition and floor-shaking authority that puts a two-hundred-watt tube amp to shame.
They will light up Gonzalo Soriano's piano from Nights In The Gardens of Spain [Decca] with so much realism that you can not only hear the air that has been set in motion after the keys are struck you can hear its waiting stillness before the keys are struck. And they do this, as I said above, not by adding distortions but by lowering noise and removing grain.
By letting us hear more deeply into pianissimos, the Napoleons literally expand dynamic range. What they lose (and it is only a smidgen) at the very extremes of fortississimo, they more than make up for in their uncanny ability to recover the extremely low-level dynamic and harmonic details that live just above the noise floor. The net result of this increase in resolving ability is a sonic presentation that has more of the seamless ease, the harmonic and dynamic continuity, of real life.
This is an amp that reproduces the sound of the past-the physical dimensions of the hall, the number and disposition of players in that hall, the kinds of instruments they played, the enthusiasm with which they played them, the microphones, miking schemes, tape machines, cabling, and mixing consoles that were used to record them--with limpid clarity, and with it, the "idea" that the recording producers and engineers had of what makes for a "realistic" sonic presentation. Never forget, folks, that none of your favorite recordings was engineered by caprice. Somewhere at the start of the process, someone in charge had a clear idea of what he or she wanted from a specific session·f what that particular piece of reproduced music ought to sound like when played back over a home stereo. It was that idea that "organized" all the myriad decisions that went into recording and mastering the record.
But a record is more that a document of time, commerce, and recording ideologies past. It is a performance that on playback comes to life-now, this minute-in your living room. What is inexorably past is made indisputably present again. And what comes to life most vividly is the sound of the music making. Of course, there is an idea revivified here, too, an idea made present with or through the sound (and the engineering)--what Schnabel called "the meaning behind the notes." From out of the past, a great stereo system holds that idea before you as if it were unfolding in front of your eyes and ears, for the very first time. Through the exciting recreation of physical presence, a great stereo instantiates artistry, intellect, and heart, clothing them in touch and articulation, in the flow of melody, the depths of color, the height of pitches. It turns your listening space into living musical space and, at the same time, into that long-ago physical space where the recording was made.
The amp that I am here recommending will, when mated to the right speaker and played at reasonable levels, do all of these things with natural ease and beauty and evenhanded grace. It will make the sound of music-and the ideas that live behind it-live again now, without scanting the documentary quality that makes records such a clear perspective on the past. Listen for example to the absolutely exquisite details that it reveals in the Andante of Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto, in the phenomenal (and phenomenally well-recorded) Leonard Bernstein performance on Columbia. The word "ethereal," like just about every other adjective, is ovenvorked by audio and music reviewers, but, honest to God, folks, this is ethereal playing (and recording), wherein the delicacy of Bernstein's touch, phrasing, and tempos, and the matching sweetness of the New York Philharmonic's accompaniment, make this great movement walk in beauty like the night. If you think, for a minute, that Bernstein wasn't much of a pianist or without subtlety and discipline as a musician, listen here-and be silent. And if you think, as so many of you do, that Columbia's engineers just stuck microphones up willy-nilly, one for every instrument, think again.
Yes, you can find harder-hitting amplifiers. Yes, you can find ones with deeper, more authoritative bass (although, down to the bottom octave, you won't find better defined pitches), and others with slightly more extended (but no more musical) highs, and a whole bunch with considerably more power, superior initial transient response, and wider application in the real-world of complex crossovers and rocky impedance plots. You can get all sorts of things that may be slightly better in all sorts of different categories in all sorts of different packages. But that only reinforces my point. It is the superb balance with which these things, and many others, are melded in the Shun-Mooked Napoleons that makes them so exceptional, and that constitutes, I believe, the highest kind of transparency.
To make instruments and instrumentalists sound both "here" and "elsewhere," fully present without loss of ambiance or color, past without loss of detail and impact, is to bridge the canyon between analyticity and musicality, between detail and context. Hearing the Napoleons (and Shun Mook Bella Voces) play is reason enough to justify what this magazine is all about: musical fidelity. When combined with the superb ancillaries that I've recommended above, it is the beating heart of my "system of the year."
MANUFACTURER
Wavelength audio 4539 Plainville Rd.
Cincinnati, OH 45227
Phone: 513-271-4186 Fax:513-271-4186
E-MAIL: waudio@cinti.net
Designers
Gordon Rankin (Amp Design), Mike LaFevre (Transformer Design)
Price: $10,000
Specifications
Input Impedance: 100 kOhms
Ouput Impedance: Switchable 4 or 8 Ohms
Bandwidth: 15 Hz-35 kHz -3 dB
Power Ouput: 8 watts RMS Feedback: Zero global feedback
Parts: 100% silver ouput transformers, silver-secondary power transformers, silver chokes, all film caps (no electrolytics)
Tube Complement: 12AU7A, 6S4A, VV300B, GZ37 Dimensions: 8"x14"x12"(H/W/D) Weight: 32 Ibs. each
Associated Equipment
Analog Front End:
Transparent Audio Well-Tempered Reference record playing system, Clearaudio Signature cartridge
Digital Front End:
Ensemble Dichronous Transport, Audio Note DAC-4 Signature, Genesis Digital Lens
Electronics: Audio Research Reference One line stage preamp, BAT VK-S line stage preamp, FM Acoustic 122 phono stage preamp.
Speakers:
Shun Mook Bella Voce, Avantgarde Trio
Cables and Interconnects:
Transparent MusicWave Reference XL-SV, Siltech LS-4 280 cable, Siltech FTM-4Gold and FTM-4Sg interconnect, Siltech Digital interconnect,Transparent Reference MusicLink
Accessories:
Shun Mook Sextet and "pucks" and woodblocks, Original Cable Jacket Co. cable jackets and grounding scheme, Shakti stones, TAD Line Conditioner, Coherence Electraclear "clock," Bright Star sandboxes and isolation pods, Townshend Seismic Sinks
STATEMENT
Fi: The Magazine of Music and Sound is a component that should be added to every sound system. Featuring the world's best writing on audio and music, Fi brings readers more of what really matters.
For subscription information call (800) 779-HIFI (4434) or write to:
Fi: The Magazine of Music and Sound P.O. Box 16747
North Hollywood, CA 91615-97644
