Had a good time yesterday at my house. Grover Huffman (maker of Grover Cables) came over peddling his wares....
well not really peddling.... I had upgraded three pairs of my Sc. Grover ICs to his newest creation the Sx IC
I also replaced my 10 foot long Monster Speaker Cables (yuck!!) with 3 foot long Grover Sx speaker cables.
But really its about the comraderie, so Grover came over cables in hand, so we could have some fun swapping cables and doing some listening.
Oh... he also brought another pair of surprises
A pair of 60 watt tube monoblocks which he built himself
So we started off by listening to my system in its baseline state with my new Modwright SWLP 9.0SE Signature tube phono/preamp, which Grover had not heard since our last little get together.
After getting an ear full of vinyl goodness, and both of us agreeing the vinyl rig sounded really good, we got down to business swapping the three sets of IC and the speaker cables, man that's hard work trying to get back there....
Well there was a definite improvement in the sound. The highs became much more natural sounding yet still detailed and refined. The mids were silky smooth, much better impact or transience .... (haha, like that word)
I am guessing much of this was due to getting rid of those crapper speaker cables, but the overall sound now was much more realistic, a real step up.
Feeling very satisfied with my system's sound now, even with green cables installed all the way around, we decided to give Grover's 60 watt tube monoblocks a go. Wanted to see how my Odyssey monoblocks w/Khismet boards would fare against the tube stuff (yeah... like you didn't see that coming )
So after some more grunting and straining moving speakers in and out of the rig and moving the monoblocks from the car to my man cave on the second story (those monoblock are freaking heavy!), and a bit of sweat, the tube monoblocks were grafted into the 'system'
There is my hairy knee in anticipation of what the tube monos have to offer
After plugging them in and letting them warm up for 10 minutes, Grover made several adustments to the bias current using his DMM and a couple of little knobs on the top of each chassis (handy to have those adjustments available). We plugged in the speaker cables to the 4 ohm taps,
Put Fleetwood Mac Rumours on the turntable, and we got down to listening......
At first blush the sound was a bit warmer than my ss amps, but the voices were much more natural sounding, and full of harmonics, in relation the ss amps made the voices more distant and a bit more hollow. The bass was kinda chocolatey and fat (did not really like it).
After listening for a while, Grover asked if there were 4 ohm speakers, I said I think they are 8 ohm, so we switched to the 8 ohm taps. Well that tightened up the bass right there. Much better control and impact. The sound was really good now. One thing these tube amps do very well is the highs. Very natural sounding cymbals, much better than the Odyssey monoblocks. Also there was better imaging and depth, a larger soundstage.
The tube monoblocks feature knobs on the front to adjust feedback as well. Grover ended up setting the knob to the half way position. The bias current was something like 15ma per tube?? I think.
An interesting note, is that Grover built these himself, using some of the best vintage transformers ever built back when tube gear was really in its prime and the equipment then was at its peak. He has a pair on 130watt monos he built and uses at home. His buddy Steve Hoffman also uses a pair that Grover built, and you can see them in his mastering room (the pic is on Grovers website, groverhuffman.com)
Switching back to the ss amps, we could easily hear the difference compared to the tube monos.
Overall it was a very fun day. I keep learning about sound, and Grover is always willing to share his experience with me and help me to hear what the next level is (damn it, this is going to get expensive )
Who knows this may be my future ...
