The EMM Labs MTRX amplifiers, Neli is out, and I have some free time…

Out come the CDs that I know Neli looks askance at… 🙂

Patrick O’Hearn [forget which one, but they’re all good], Jean Michel Jarre, Live in China, Klaus Schultz, Angst, Moody Blues, Threshold of a Dream (SACD)….

I think...
I think I am.
Therefore I am!
I think...

Holy cow. I always think of when I first played these albums, over and over, pre-teens to early twenties, how I LONGED for the music to sound this way. Talk about angst…

The EMM Labs MTRX amplifiers are going to drive the poop out of your speakers

We’ve never had bass like this here, like we have with the MTRX on the Acapella Atlas. It really kicks my butt. [3 x 10 inch woofers (one is isobaric). I think the built-in Bladeilius amps on the 6 x 9 inch woofers of the Marten Coltrane Supreme speakers we had here are of the laid back bass variety, like most solid-state amps that have a decent midrange. Edge amps are another one].

It is a supremely bold effort – to make solid-state amps that are incredibly ballsy but still sound like music.

It is like what Krell should have been. What it wanted to be when it grew up.

I tell you, these amps are the ultimate ‘Boys Toy’ 🙂 🙂

It is so hard to tell how loud it is, everything is so clear sounding, and it is so much fun to keep turning up the volume. I have to do the old trick of talking out loud to the room to see if I can hear my own voice… or not…

The EMM Labs MTRX amplifiers are going to dominate the sound of your system

This not a bad thing. 🙂

We are doing a few cable shootouts these days. Nordost Valhalla and Odin. Acrolink [forget which models]. NVS Sound [lots of models].

Going from $16K Odin to $4K Valhalla interconnects is instructive.

A little duller sound, a little fuzzier imaging, a little nosier background.

But that is it.

Still have most of the slam, the control of the speakers, the notes staying separate in their little envelopes, the melodies not getting all fuzzed together… the amps still were doing their thing. The intrinsic character of  the system stayed really pretty much the same [mostly, I missed the Odin’s black, black, BLACK background].

The EMM Labs MTRX amplifiers are going to ruin other solid-state amps for you

Those others? They are really dull-sounding and really wimpy. A bunch of girly men [I’m reading Arnold’s book. So… 🙂 ]. They, in hindsight, cannot keep separate melodies separate, the cannot reproduce all of the instruments of an orchestra at the same time, they cannot reproduce bass with all the authority of true-to-life bass [which the best tube amps can do, but not at this volume!!! Yeehaw!!!].

The EMM Labs MTRX amplifiers are a really bold effort to make a solid-state amp that is not just a ‘convenience’.

Sure, most solid-state amps are reliable, you turn them on. They work. They get the music from the preamp to the speaker. What’s to complain about?

It is like when (a few) cable companies started making cables that were not designed to fuzz out the sound. Most cable companies still make blurry-sounding cables so that you don’t get your ears chewed off by the horrible edginess of the upstream equipment. When they started making cables clear sounding, letting us hear the music, it was like a dream come true for people who like hearing the music.

I like hearing the music. It is really awesome. And I bet you do too.

The MTRX amps will be at CES 2015 driving Wilson Alexia speakers. Maybe the Venetian will let them crank it up once in a while. But even if they don’t it should be quite interesting. I’m really looking forward to hearing that system – and triangulating it with what we hear here. Yep. Interesting.

EMM Labs MTRX amplifiers day 15 report.

I want to talk a little about our history with amplifiers.

Our first real amplifier were Levinson 20.6 100 watt/channel pure class A amplifiers. We got them about four years old, used [from Alvino at the old Sound Hounds. We still see Alvino at RMAF once in awhile. If you want to blame someone, blame him :-)], and they were so much better than the $4K Denon and the Adcom 555 (I think) before that. So much more authority and openness. The Levinsons warmed our living-room during the Winters and heated it to near intolerable levels during the summers for about 5 years.

Then we got the Edge NL10 amps. So much clearer, much more resolution, more life.

It was just a few years later when we got the Lamm ML2.1 single-ended tube amps here. Music. Sweet Music. This was not just great sound, but music.

Then there were the Audio Note UK Kegon 300B SET amps. This is when ‘drug-like’ sound started to infect me. When I started getting random flashbacks to when I was young and ‘hearing’ music for the first time. This was when my life opened up, and I chose to live a life that was accepting of any and all, but still all too rare, not-your-ordinary-everyday mind-altering ‘music experiences’.

And this lifestyle required tube amps.

Because solid-state amps sound D.E.A.D. Or at least, they used to.

All the vocals on solid-state sound as if the singer was a tired over-worked professional belting out the 34th take in a sterile, smoke-filled studio in some drab building in the big city. They ‘fake’ any emotional involvement in the song.

All my life, until tubes, this is how I thought music sounded. Listening to music like this, it was still enjoyable. It is not like there is a choice provided to most people. It is either solid-state sound, or no music at all.

Like music on TV, Lawrence Welk – all the fake smiles and fake emotions. No emotion in any music. When learning guitar or in the [required Junior High School] glee club – when they said ‘Emote!’ I had no idea what the heck they were talking about. None of the music I had heard had any emotion in it. It was all reproduced with solid-state. And later bad digital. I thought professional musicians were not supposed to emote, it wasn’t professional.

A month or so ago, we had an 100% solid-state system here for a few weeks. No tubes. At all. And the above paragraph describes the truth that I re-realized about my, and probably many others, relationship to music and the lack of real human everyday emotion in most of it… if you listen to it on solid-state equipment.

Fred posted a comment a few weeks ago about how he did not care how the MTRX compared to other solid-state – how did it compare to the best tube amps?

Well, I’ve finally moved past a lot of the need, that I personally felt, to compare it to other solid-state amps. I’ve gone down the list of other amps and determined how and why they had not met my needs. They did not support my ‘musical mind-altering lifestyle’.

Essentially, solid-state amps have been unable to convey real, honest-to-goodness we hear it everyday, human emotion.

A few weeks ago our solid-state system was the EMM XDS1 CD player and EMM Labs PRE2 into the Edge M12 amps. All are on the musical side of neutral. But no emotion. D.E.A.D.

But yesterday we put in the EMM Labs PRE2 in to replace the [tube-based] Audio Note M9 Phono preamplifier. We are 100% solid-state, again.

But there is still emotion! It is different. A little bit different. There is not that tube-driven dynamic swell of exuberance for each note like tubes provide [what is more ‘real’?]. But there is sufficient resolution and control of the dynamic swings in a voice that there is actually some emotion communicated from the musician to the listener here.

We have been enjoying a very rich Heart and Mind sound here, with the AN M9Phono in the system. It is hard to weigh and tell you the ratio of Heart to Mind that that system has, as my mind is still very, very fascinated by what the MTRX are doing. So much clarity and so much more dynamics and accuracy and so like real music.

All I can say is that there IS some heart to the EMM Labs MTRX amplifiers, unlike any solid-state amp I have heard.

Or, I think, they are able to let through the subtle details of the music, the details that convey emotion from one human to another. Subtleties of breath inhalation and exhalation, subtleties of harmonic structure changes in a voice, the slight off-the-beat notes that indicate suspense or excitement, depending on if they occur right before or right after the beat used by the rest of the music. Solid-state amps haven’t been able to do any of this stuff [yeah, I know, some very famous reviewers do not care. To them music must be fine without the ‘subtleties of emotion’. But that doesn’t mean that we have to think it is fine, too.].

These subtle details are required for my personal music-holic lifestyle. Not sure I can ‘travel to strange new worlds’ in my listening chair without them.

“Engage warp drive, Sulu”… I mean ‘MTRX drive’.