This is close enough to do me. Certainly not the system I would have expected to finish up with.
The NS1000s as described in reviews are the last speaker I would have ever aspired to own. Crass, shrill, metallic monitors they say.
Any-one will tell you that 18 Watts will never give enough drive to really rock a 90dB speaker and my little amps only actually put out about 16 Watts. 300Bs don't do bass or top end and subwoofers are impossible to integrate seamlessly. Ah well, don't believe all you are told.
The big Carys are smoother, more forgiving, but those old Audions are a class above. I owned what were possibly the first pair of Silver Night Parallel Single Ended Mono-Blocks in Australia way back in the early '90s. This is my second pair and I waited a long time to get them. Just great amplifiers from a rarely mentioned company and an even less recognised designer Erik Andersson. The arrival of the Golden Dragon 300B in the early '90's was soon followed by a 300B SET amplifier in the dark days of valve amplification,the Silver Nights PSE Mono-Blocks. We currently live in the golden revival age! The interior of these earlier units are absolute old school, wooden rails, copper screws....looks like a six year old put them together. They do things though, very special.
I have a Yamaha B-2 coming for those times I need to push the SPLs a little further into insanity but this is a nice balanced system and it goes plenty loud. Very affordable cables, no million dollar substation feeding in the power. I believe, and always will believe, that if you can get the amplifier / speaker relationship correct the rest becomes simple. If that relationship is wrong you can spend your whole life and entire bank account playing around with sources, cables ,voodoo and general insanity.
There are many in this hobby who love the chase, the fiddling and tuning, upgrading, finding greater resolution etc, etc. Not me. All I ever wanted was to find my sound and then just sit and enjoy. I managed it once before but it all got stolen. Finally managed it again and those funny little amplifiers have been at the heart of both systems.
The last little experiment will be V-Fet v SET but I have a feeling I will just keep both and enjoy their differences.
Cheers,
Hugh
