This system – the Audio Note Ongaku 211-based integrated amplifier into $7K AN/E HE speakers, driven by a little $3.5K Audio Note CD2.1x Mark II Player [Valhalla speaker cable and AN interconnects] – is obviously somewhat unbalanced – the amplifier costing a wee bit more than the rest of the system put together.

But it sounds VERY engaging. The amp is just tossing note around like they were wisps of air [:-)], it so completely dominates the sound.

Is this approx. $100K system better than a more balanced one with, say, $30K AN speakers and a $30K Conquest-like amp and $20K digital transport and DAC and $20K preamp?

Probably not.

But it is really fun to listen to – especially if you are familiar enough with listening around, and to, individual components in the system. You can HEAR all the flaws, and unsuspected strengths, in the weaker components.

For example, the upper-mids and highs of the little 1-box CD player are really quite good – but the lower mids are a little laid back, and complex passages do not have quite the separation, in comparison to $10 and $20K digital. Pretty good trade-offs, I think.

And, often, perhaps it is the lack of sophistication, the lack of complexity, to the overall sound that makes it really surprisingly straight-forwardly exuberant sometimes – when it all just comes together.

You know, they say happiness is the removal of pain. Like the scratching of an itch. So, perhaps for ultimate musical enjoyment, there has to be some pain, something not quite EXCELLENT, mixed in with the excellent sound, for us to feel that ultimate Audiophile High? [if so, boy do we all need therapy or what? ;-)]

The inside of one of the Audio Note Kegon Balance 300B amplifiers. The Kegon Balance is essentially a 300B Gaku-on. The Gaku-on is Audio Note’s best amplifier which is based on the 211 tube.

The sound?

Very dynamic and controlled. The signature reticence of the speaker’s ceramic drivers is no longer audible. It is hard to over-state this aspect of these amps. A lot of the time is just spent thinking ‘I didn’t know amps could DO that’.

In comparison, solid-state amps just smack the notes out with a sledge-hammer – they [currently seem to] have no ability to control the shape of the notes as it they are supposed to be – if they are to sound like music [or even just musical] that is.

And in comparison, most tube amps just sound anemic, where they, overall, can generated notes shaped more naturally, more real, than solid-state, but lack that SMACK that most musicians often apply to their piano or guitar or drum.

Just the right amount of harmonics. Which is to say more than the Lamm ML2.1 6C33C tube-based amplifier, and less than your other 300B-based amplifiers [that we have heard]. Presumably all of our readers know how bad too little harmonics affects the enjoyability of music. And for too much harmonics, too much harmonics and the primary tone washes out the lesser tones – and it is the lessor tones that make a person hear deep into the richness and playfulness and… I don’t know – that thing that happens when you go into a toy store and bang on some chimes – or into a Tibetan store [we have a dozen here in Boulder] and bang on the gongs or use the Bhuddist bowls – or to a piano store and bang on the keys of their best piano — JUST to listen to the sound and the undertones [and the lovely decades-long decay].

Anyway – more on this system after RMAF.