I heard this amplifier on pipe dreams two years running at CES, and both years went back to the room several times.
I'd previously heard the pipe dreams several times and without getting into details let's just say that I never really warmed up to them. When driven by the big GamuT amp, the sound was incredible. Gone were the minor but distracting colorations I was aware of in the pipes before. The dynamics really were like live music when designer Ole Christiansen cranked it up. It was so loud you had to shout to the person next to you, but it didn't hurt your ears which probably means that there was little or no clipping and very little high-order distortion.
Word I heard was that some review criticized one of Ole's earlier amps as not having as robust a power supply as some of the competition. I don't think anyone can ever say that about the S-300.
This is my wife's favorite big solid state amplifier. She goes to all the shows with me and has better ears than I do. Its equal may be out there, but I haven't heard it yet. If I'm not mistaken, the S-300 uses a single high power MOSFET output device for each phase of each channel rather than banks of closely-but-not-quite-perfectly matched output devices. The result is a superb all-around amp instead of just a brutally powerful one-trick pony.
Duke
I'd previously heard the pipe dreams several times and without getting into details let's just say that I never really warmed up to them. When driven by the big GamuT amp, the sound was incredible. Gone were the minor but distracting colorations I was aware of in the pipes before. The dynamics really were like live music when designer Ole Christiansen cranked it up. It was so loud you had to shout to the person next to you, but it didn't hurt your ears which probably means that there was little or no clipping and very little high-order distortion.
Word I heard was that some review criticized one of Ole's earlier amps as not having as robust a power supply as some of the competition. I don't think anyone can ever say that about the S-300.
This is my wife's favorite big solid state amplifier. She goes to all the shows with me and has better ears than I do. Its equal may be out there, but I haven't heard it yet. If I'm not mistaken, the S-300 uses a single high power MOSFET output device for each phase of each channel rather than banks of closely-but-not-quite-perfectly matched output devices. The result is a superb all-around amp instead of just a brutally powerful one-trick pony.
Duke