GRAMOPHONE DREAMS - An affordable purist amplifier with punch

It was a cold March-in-Brooklyn morning. Clouds had been shedding wintery mix since daybreak. By 9am, birds were flash-mobbing my window, demanding suet. But I was frozen-unable to pull my mind loose from the grave flowings of American composer Ned Rorem's Book of Hours, as performed by Les Connivences Sonores on the album Musikalische Perlen (24/48 FLAC, Ars Produktion/Qobuz). The sounds in my room were sensuous and mesmerizing, and I needed to float in their mysterious energy as long as I could.

- HERB REICHERT

I was listening through the most compelling sound system I had assembled since I started writing for Stereophile. The dCS Bartók DAC/streamer was funneling the harmonic purity and hypnomagik of Odile Renault on flute and Elodie Reibaud on harp into HoloAudio's appropriately named Serene preamp, which was feeding Elekit's TU-8900 300B/2A3 kit amplifier, which was sending a few of its triode-tube watts to the TAD's $32,500/pair Compact Evolution One monitors, more compactly known as the TAD CE1TX. I reviewed these three-way standmount speakers last month, finding them to be the most exciting, accurate-sounding, well-engineered speakers I've encountered.

What was unique about this system was not how it sounded but how easily it enabled diverse forms of music to summon reverie and affect my state of mind-how it made rhythms linger in my head after the music stopped.

My review was finished, and I knew the TADS were leaving tomorrow, so I figured that day would be best spent bathing in the completely crazy fantasticness of an 8W, relatively inexpensive, made-in-Japan kit amp(!) driving a 4 ohm, 85dB-sensitive, also-made-in-Japan box speaker of the highest pedigree.

Well-recorded compositions for flute and harp leave no place for dry-sounding feedback amps or dull-sounding box speakers to hide. Both instruments' harmonics must be fully exposed. For these high-energy instruments to have a touchable vibratory presence, a system's upper octaves need to be information-rich, pure, extended, and harmonically complete. Somehow, on that day, that Elekit-TAD combo was doing what felt like a perfect job of being pure and harmonically complete.