Only one speaker is powered and both speakers employ a passive crossover – a VA speciality and key to the sense of musical coherence their designs have always enjoyed. With only one powered speaker, you will need to connect it to the second speaker using a speaker cable, but before you throw up your hands in horror, that’s just substituting one (speaker) cable for another (power cable). It’s a practical compromise in terms of absolute flexibility, but the gains in musical performance made it a mandatory choice as far as VA was concerned.
The whole system runs from an iOS/Android App and predicted price (including sales tax) will be in the region of €12,000. Given that that includes the front-end, amplification and control capability, this promises to deliver a lot of music for the money. Whilst I retain reservations about digital amplification and streaming in general, if anybody can make it work on a musical level, it’s the quality-obsessed Vienna Acoustics. It should be fascinating to see and hear the solution they have arrived at.
VTL – Atrium 4.1 E113
Projects and prototypes are notoriously unpredictable when it comes to arriving on time, but if things do go to plan, VTL will be showing what promises to be a really significant new amplifier. There’s no name, no specs and no pack-drill (as yet) but what we are talking about here is ‘Son of Siegfried’ – a fully enclosed, fully regulated mono-bloc built into VTL’s stylish and practical ‘tower’ format chassis work. Featuring eight KT88/6550 output tubes (as opposed to the Siegfried’s dozen) the new amp will be the same width as the Siegfried/S-400 but shorter and not as deep. Hopefully it will also be slightly lighter – but that’s just my aching back saying that!
With four output pairs per side, coupled to an all-new output transformer, what ‘Son of Siegfried’ does promise is to offer much of the flagship’s load tolerance and absolute musical stability and authority, but combined with the articulate midrange and lively dynamics of the S-400. If it succeeds then that will be an enticing prospect indeed. Don’t visit the VTL room expecting to see a clutch of baby Siegfrieds. The prototypes will be built into the existing Siegfried chassis – so just count the output tubes…
CH Precision – Atrium 4.1 F118
So many reasons to visit the CH Precision room: They’ll be playing an all-analogue set-up; That set-up will be all 10 Series, products that have set the reviewing community firmly on its ear; It will include the new P10 phono-stage which – given the performance of the P1 – should be something special and, for those short of the sort of cash required to actually purchase 10 Series components, the question of whether (or not) they can maintain the enviable sound-quality they achieved last year?
Of course, they played analogue last year, using the TechDAS Air Force III Premium and Thales Statement tonearms. But it had to share billing with three-years worth of product development (the D1.5 transport and C1.2 DAC, as well as the first public showing of the L10/M10 amplifiers), which made for a programme heavy with structured demos.
