Few people in life really get to go for the gusto! You Jay are living it every step of the way! Thank you for your passion and pursuit of excellence in High End Audio! "Young men have visions and Old men dream dreams!"
New mic, and additional acoustic treatment are a great benefit to these demo recordings. You continue to raise the bar of your channel Jay. We greatly appreciate your hard work, and financial investment. Thanks
I gotta say Jay, this is some very serious hardware you have assembled here. This is without a doubt some of the best gear out on the market, and YOU are the only channel that lets us hear what it can do with top notch everything. Your channel is like Christmas. You do for the the enthusiast what no other channel does. Though you do talk about it some, which I enjoy, but you also let the us do the listening to judge for ourselves. I’ve really learned a ton from your channel. What I’ve learned from all your different pairings is that what sounded best, was a balance loosely on mating the right speaker and amp combo. Since you use the very best line stages, source components, my intuition tells me although it matters a whole lot, in this particular case, not so much, but there is something to be learned from that also, but more thoughts on that later. Some of the best amp/speaker pairings I feel comes from the very recent Gryphon Essence 55 watt amp that has something like 450,000 micro farads of capacitance behind it, which is a lot mated to the M6. That high resolving and highly neutral amp paired extremely well with the Magico M6 that had a voice that leaned into rich and bloomy midrange - akin to the voicing of an Apogee flat panel speaker. The neutral amp made the best of the I think Accuton drivers in the Magico. That was such a great, almost magical pairing. What didn’t go well with that rich leaning M6 was a rich leaning X350.8 and X600.8 amplifiers. If sound could be represented by chocolate, that pairing had entirely way too much sweet milk chocolate. The highly neutral and resolving nature of the Essence balanced out the M6’s rich sound. Prior to this, another noteworthy and great pairing was the Pass XA60.8 paired with the Wilson Sasha DAWs. The Pass XAs had that bloomy midrange but not as much as the regular X series of Pass amp it seems. That bloomy amp paired very well with the Wilson speaker that is opposite of the Magico house sound, in that the Wilson is a neutral and very detailed oriented speaker, which follows with that general Focal house sound, where Wilson uses Focal drivers. That Pass injected the richness into that neutral and very detailed speaker, in effect rounding off the sharpness that the speaker is naturally voiced with. The XA60.8 and Sasha DAW, wow! This long prelude brings me to the current arrangement. The Gryphon, unlike the Pass XA amps, is a whole different league in resolving power and greater dynamics, everywhere, which brings greater energy to all frequency ranges. The frequency range that the these Super Wilson’s are naturally voiced in is lots of detail in the upper midrange and lower treble. So adding a very high energy voiced amp that is very resolving, and in your face due to the power/high energy storage from tons of capacitance, that really emphasizes the Wilson house sound of hyper accurate Focal drivers that accentuate upper mids and lower treble. This pairing of high resolving, high energy amps with no chocolaty sweet midrange that Pass XAs have and the Wilson house/Focal house sound of hyper accuracy in the upper mid band makes for, well, super duper hyper detail that is somewhat over accentuated to a degree in my opinion. To take some of that sharpness off, something like maybe an ARC Ref 10 line stage, or a Pass XS line stage would temper and round off the ultra pointy bits of the music to give it a tinge of mellowness, but one can only speculate. Now, I like what a Magico does to a high energy neutral amp, and I like what a Wilson does to a chocolate sweet amp like the Pass to sharpen the overall presentation, what I’m not so keen on is high caffeinated amps, paired with even more highly caffeinated speakers, but that’s the great thing about opinion, it’s just mine, and my opinion only counts for me, and as I’ve tried follow to some degree, other people’s opinion count also and even more so. In any case Jay, as usual man, keep up the brilliant work, and thank you a ton, for all the hard work you do to bring this awesome content to us. You’re the MAN!
@@philipzappala4850 Class A Pass amps…. this needs some clarification so here goes - a Pass X150/250/260/350/600 dot 8 amps ALL provide Class A power before the bias scheme slides from an on all the time device that characterizes an A amp, to when it becomes an AB or switching amp, where a pair of devices switch back and forth to create a continuous DC audio signal. For example, the X600.8 bias scheme is that it runs in A up to 100 watts into 8 ohms, then on the 101st watt, the amp slides to a switching AB amp. The X260.8 surprisingly runs in pure A up to 30 wpc into 8 ohms. So these X amps run in A up to a set point, then it become an AB switching amp. Now, Pass XA amps are Class A for their entire stated rating. An XA100.8 amp remains in A for the full 100 watts into 8 ohms, but in a magazine test, it really plays to 241 watts in Class A because Pass conservatively rates their XA amps. The XA amps have very large capacitor banks that give them that high dynamic headroom. So now that The meaning of Class A is somewhat defined, as far as a sound goes, indeed, Pass Amps do have a house sound, and that is one that sounds like tube gear, especially one that is in single ended triode or SET. Is it as Western Electric 300B sound - no, not exactly, hah! So in a general sense, Pass labs have a bloom in the mid to upper midrange that lights the instrument from with I like to say, at least with the right neutral sounding speaker. I read that Pass characterizes their XA60.8 and XA160.8 amps to have a warmer sound than the XA100.8. So the precise voicing of an amp changes from one to another, but the house sound is maintained. Like I really learned from Jay’s awesome channel, balance is achieved with a neutral speaker paired to a bloomy Pass amp. Listen to any of the videos where Jay used the XA60.8 with any variety of neutral Wilson speakers; they all sounded terrific. Now Jay for a short time, teased us with the X350.8 and the mighty X600.8 amps paired to the Magico M6. I personally thought the rich voice of these amps paired with the rich voice of the Magico M6’s was just too much. That lit from within bloom was completely gone and the music was saddled with overly rich mid and upper midrange, in my opinion. Then Jay paired the Magico with a super resolving Essence amp and that is where the true hifi magic occurred. Wow. Anyways, sorry for being verbose but when it comes to complicated topics, long answers ensue. Sorry for being wordy. So in two words, choose carefully!
Jays it sounds very good, I like the warmer more analog sound this setup brings. On another note, have you seriously taken a look at something like the Tidal Akira and what it can do with your top of the line electronics? Would love to see the Tidal’s in your setup.
Sounds Dame good. question would you say that gryphon Amps overall are clearer better sounding and have better sound stage then pass labs amps like here your thoughts tom ATL
Sounds fine to me. You'll have to let us know which amps you prefer in this setup. Comparisons with past setups are largely useless, irrelevant given the most recent changes, IMO.
Well thanks for that; many of us disagree. Certainly no one would base a purchasing decision based upon what to hear here, but it could readily be used to narrow down what to audition at home in our own systems. While soundstaging and such doesn't necessarily transfer, impact and transient response does, at least if it's poor.
