Owners

A vinyl fundamentalist of forty years with a Linn LP12, who had been through several converters and streamers and found all of them tiring. Too bright, too busy dissecting the sound instead of playing the music.

Being a tech geek, he was worried about the specifications — an eighteen-bit chip from the previous century handling his 24/192 and DSD files. His answer from here was to stop reading numbers and follow the tune instead.

What he heard on a piano and double bass record was the ensemble in the room. On Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, the drama in the voice. He listens to whole records now instead of skipping between tracks.

His one complaint: the box is large enough that his wife noticed it arriving.

He set out wanting a valve converter, found the market full of them, and found the prices ranging from cheap to absurd. A Norwegian forum thread pointed him here.

Six weeks after ordering, a very large parcel arrived. Detailed, big and natural, was his description, with none of the hard sibilance he had been trying to escape. He is now enjoying the part where you start rolling valves.

After reading more reviews and specifications than she cared to count, a recommendation brought her here. What decided it was that the converter could be built to her specification, and that every question got an answer quickly — including, as she put it, the stupid ones.

The first thing she noticed was the bass: controlled and punchy where it had previously been loose and overblown. Above that, openness and clarity, and detail in familiar records that had not been there before.

He found sound hard to describe, then described it anyway: air around each instrument, micro-dynamics easy to follow, and an orchestra that stays separated rather than cooking down into one pan — his comparison was Norwegian lapskaus.

The soundstage he called large but slightly forward, though not front-row. The converter, he said, is the conductor in his system.

Previously an Audio Note 4.1 Signature owner, driving SET triodes into 99 dB speakers. He found this converter more true to the recording, better defined in the bass, more open at the top, and different rather than lesser in the midrange.

He sold the Audio Note.