Next up - Atma-Sphere M-60 OTL monos.
I had heard these at Munich sounding very odd driving some horns. Here, the sound just floated out in a super spacious, very easy to listen to way, but at the same time with some very strange colourations. They didn't sound like anything I had ever heard before. Really curious stuff, I thought. Is it the amps, or the speakers, or both?
Here's the video I shot at the time. There's some odd camera noise on it, but later on in the video the electronic music really did sound odd, to say the least, and thankfully there's no camera noise on that bit.
Here, at the Malvern Audio Research there was an obvious incompatibility with the Audio Detail preamp. We had to crank the volume up to eleven to get any appreciable volume. And even then the results were less than inspiring. They just weren't going to work. I theorised that the obviously high output of a Lampizator DAC would drive them well, so we had an idea. Next door was a Lampizator GG with Jupiter caps by-passed with Mundorfs, some Lampizator Special 45s (made by EML, no longer available a limited edition run) and a very special NOS GEC 5U4G (expensive rectifier). We thought we'd try the M-60s in that.
Note that MAR are not Atma-sphere dealers, and these amps were brought along by someone else.