Audio Note M10 preamplifier

We put the Audio Note M10 preamplifier on the main system upstairs today. Things were kind of in a mess after a recent audition, anyway… 🙂 so we took it as an impetus to see what a Meitner front end driving the Audio Note M10 preamplifier itself driving an Audio Note Kegon amplifier would sound like.

[By the way, that white stuff outside, that is a couple of inches of hail. Yes, it is indeed June 24th.]

I mean, instead of using the Meitner DCC2 DAC built-in preamplifier, which can only but be about $5K of the cost of the DAC, we put a $50K preamplifier in the system with its brother $50K amplifier.

How do you think it is going to sound?

Neli is planning on writing a nasty letter to Peter Q. of Audio Note for letting us ever audition the M10. 🙂

We did most of our listening after the unit being on for only 5 minutes, It has now been 3 hours or so.

There are some audiophile-approved attributes that got a big jump up in quality: harmonics, bass, room pressurization, continuousness, imaging, solidity….

But, people, this is not about me devolving, dehumanizing, detaching the sound into its constituent parts.

OK, Janis’s Rachmaninov on SACD is playing – and I am trying to write this during the breaks between pieces because it is too hard to concentrate when the music is playing down the hall outside my office in the livingroom.

For many people, of a certain age and certain life experiences, music and the pursuit of the reproduction thereof, is an attempt to not only experience the music of our youth, but to recapture the feelings and sense of wonder and appreciation of the beauty that life offers us – but which the years and a well-nourished cynicism distances us from; slowly, inexorably, until life sometimes seems like a cold, boring, cruel joke.

But for a few minutes, or hours if the system is very, very good, and most of the time if the system is this good, our defenses are ripped away and we are filled with the child’s sense of the wonder-of-it-all.

[Here we see the Emm Labs DCC2 DAC, the silver-ish box, which is receiving a signal through 10 meter long optical cables from the transport located on the other side of the room. This is connected, by the Valhalla interconnects that are looping through the sky like the St. Louis Arch, to the M10 preamplifier in the center front. The M10 preamplifier is powered by the two, large, black, about 50lb each power supply boxes called Galahads located in the rear. Finally, the M10 preamp is connected, through INDRA interconnects, to the two Kegon 300B single-ended triode amplifiers (whose tubes are plainly visible).]

What we want our systems to do, what this system does for the both of us:

To communicate with our hearts and minds so well, so powerfully, that we are defenseless against it.

Neli says: “Yeah, Neli hates almost all preamplifiers … finally found another one she likes, 3 big boxes, 2 of ’em heavy boxes, $50K. Verrrry nice linestage. Ack!!!”