Warning: this post will probably get very lengthy.
This morning I completed my build of my Stereomour around 10:30 AM. You can see it here:
http://www.bottlehead.com/smf/index.php/topic,1900.0.htmlI hooked it up to my system (details at end of post) and spent the whole day listening.
I live in an apartment building which has very thick walls, but not so thick ceilings. I listened at very moderate levels up to 7:00 pm out of courtesy to the fellow who lives upstairs, works nights and sleeps during the day.
Therefore, we'll have low level impressions, and BLASTING impressions.
I had read lots of accolades for SET amps, and in particular, SET amps based on 2A3 tubes for a long time. I had never heard one, but after reading so many praises (one man reported tearing up over the sound of Allison Krauss' voice on first listen of a 2A3 SET), I was intrigued, to say the least.
Things are different now. Back in my college days, the local music store in a little college town in Wyoming stocked and could demonstrate, JBL, Advent, Cerwin Vega, Marantz, etc., etc. Where can I go hear an esoteric amp like the Stereomour. Faith is required.
I adapt. I gave up on trying to listen to studio monitors in a noisy Guitar Center environment, and a few years ago bought an $1,100 pair of Adam A7s on the internet without ever hearing them. It worked out, I never even considered returning them.
But now I want to try out this esoteric SET tube amp without ever hearing one, AND, I have to put it together. OK, I did it. That's the background. Now, on to the listening impressions.
My very first impression was that, although it was clean, and amazingly functioning despite that fact that *I* was the person who assembled it, it didn't sound all that different from the Sherwood S-5000II that had been driving these speakers before.
Wrong. First impressions are important, but not always accurate. My impressions of the Stereomour changed throughout the day, but always for the better.
I was listening at low levels, around 70 - 75 dB. I noticed that the low end was different. At first, I thought that there was less bass than with the Sherwood. Is there less bass, or is it tighter, better defined? At least now I'm hearing that it IS a different sound from the Sherwood. Conclusion? The Sherwood's bass is bloated and boomy. It's a push-pull amp, and a great amp of it's day, but as an integrated amp, it also has tone controls, and how can one know that it's truly flat even though the controls are set at zero?
I spent time pondering this change in low end, and mind you, I was listening at low levels, to very polite music. Chamber music. String quartets, piano trios, that sort of thing.
I spent most of the day, being limited in my volume levels, to polite classical music. It wasn't a chore, I like this stuff. I came to believe that this sort of low end is probably flatter than what the Sherwood had been giving me. Indeed, with these big speakers, and the Sherwood's 36 watts a channel, and a fairly small room, there was boominess before. Not now.
I tuned into the bass. I hate subjective descriptions full of lush, creamy mids with an aftertaste of oak, but this bass was definitely more DEFINED.
In fact, many things were more defined. I remember people describing their SET amps and talking about definition, but I HEARD it today.
Yes, some low level things were popping out that I hadn't heard before. There's a bit of the BBC nature recordings of the bird you hear toward the end of "Blackbird" that I hadn't heard before. It's very, very low, and comes in before the one that you notice right away.
Other details in Blackbird: the metronome sounds so much more like a metronome. When I heard it the first time on lo-fi in 1968, I assumed they mic'ed him tapping his foot. Later I read that it was a metronome, but it still sounded like a tapping foot. No doubt with the Stereomour, it's a metronome.
Another new detail: Paul's voice is double tracked, very subtlety, but the level of the double track is raised on the choruses.
Well, it went on like that, and here's my conclusion on the difference in sound (finally!):
What I noticed is a tremendous increase in the reproduction of attack transients. This may be what people are referring to when they say that SET amps have more DETAIL. Some of the detail may come from the fact that the bass is flatter, but I was hearing the details of attack transients like I haven't heard outside of the recording studio.
Attack transients are the very beginning part of a sound. The pick on the string, the stick on the cymbal, the rosin on the bow. It's the sizzle. It's high energy, high frequency sound, and very difficult to reproduce. But I heard them all over the place today.
Patsy Cline. This stuff was recorded in the early sixties, and today was the first time I noticed that the bass player was using a pick.
I've got some Cuban folkloric music, Yoruba religious stuff, and you could hear every calloused thumb hitting those bat
