Spectral,
Congratulations. They do look gorgeous!
Out of curiosity, before dropping that coin, did you listen to any other brands? Jon Valin has been praising Soulution as a great match with ML, and I'm sure there a few others.
Also, have you been getting any sleep?
Thanks. Actually I have not listened to them extensively yet, but it's weekend now
I have not cranked them up either. What I have very easily noticed, though, is how effortless the sound is, how damn right everything sounds with razor-sharp images.
Soulution et al... I have not heard them, they are really out of my league price-wise and so is FM Acoustics. The Spectrals list for $19K and are not discounted, but considering that I already have all the ancillary requisite equipment the decision was a no-brainer, plus I got a lot for my previous amp, therefore I did not break the bank.
Sound-wise, people on Agon, who have presumably heard all of them, rate these amps along with the Soulutions and FMA with slight differences: a bit more weight and emphasis in the bass in the Soulutions, a bit more recessed midrange in the FMA. I wouldn't know, but I have to assume that, regardless of how extremely "reasonably" priced the Spectrals are (and Spectral claimed in their TAS review that they price all products at 3X of parts wholesale cost, regardless of all other R&D and operational costs), the others must be at least marginally better, and I suspect there are other products that outperform them as well, least but not least perhaps the ARC 610's and the mega VTL's. For example, I've heard in the long past the ARC Ref 600's and I thought back then they were quite a bit better than the Series I of the DMA-360's... draw your own conclusions (I personally think that ARC is another bargain brand). So if JV thinks that the Soulution are a great match with ML and all aforementioned amps are just about the same give or take a tiny bit, that probably confirms my position that Spectral matches really well with ML as well.
From my perspective, I've worked with their products up and down the stack for the last 16 years now, and I've been pretty much sold that they are in most cases very avant garde, but not necessarily the last word at every point in time, which is great - technology does improve; their bargain-basement pricing which raises the performance/cost ratio sky-high has been *extremely* attractive to me. Technology-wise, yes I am totally with them: ultra-high speed, wide-bandwidth and stability does pay off, thermal tails are indeed an issue that must be addressed to avoid "memory" effects in the transistors, a system approach isn't necessarily a bad thing, etc.
These amps do appear to be the epitome of that line. However, just like about every other line of electronics, their sound has changed and improved over the years. Despite the fact that these electronics have always been extremely wide bandwidth to achieve the speed they are after, the sound has indeed improved (and so have the parts - e.g. notice the new Mundorf output terminals, so common nowadays, which replaced the old cheesy ones they were using before). That should confirm again that measurements alone just don't do the trick; if nothing else, they are still A/B class. Having said that, if I were to measure these Series II's for squarewave response right now (and not just at 1kHz or 10kHz, but even at 500kHz), I bet I'd see the most perfectly-square one out there.
Finally, I find them to be a good match for anything fast, neutral and transparent in the loudspeaker domain out there. More to come...
