Is the Exemplar 3910 clearly superior to the 2900?

This is a review of the new Exemplar/Denon 3910, but four improvements made such major improvements in the sound that they must be included. First was the substitution of Amperex 7062 pinch waist tubes for the provided 5695s. During the first 200 hours of break-in I tolerated the 5695s but ultimately I put in the pinch waists. These are far more dynamic and transparent and present a much more plausible sound stage. The second change was treating the entire unit inside and out with AudioTop workstation treatments, including the fuse and tube pins and sockets. This gave a lower noise floor and extended top-end and just greater purity to the sound. Third was a full break-in of more than 300 hours, much of it with the Purist Audio break-in disk. The unit gave a real roller-coast ride with some frequencies sounding great while others were terrible. It often sounded dull and smeared while at other times it was bright. Fourth was finally getting the IsoClean PT-3030G II isolation transformers (a parallel pair). Within 36 hours they had added a further lowering of noise and great authority to the mid-bass and bass. Furthermore they result in having trouble with the volume setting you use. Quiet passages, such as Holly Cole’s Take Me Home on the Temptation album becomes incredibly and realistically loud when she gets going later. Crescendos on symphonic works rock the rooms. I might add that I have the H-Cat P12A line stage that played right into the hands of the Exemplar 3910s vivid soundstage. My old Exemplar 2900 also had all of these benefits with resulting leaps by it also.

I used the Burmester CDII disk for purposes of saying what different music sounded like. On Radka Toneff’s Moon is a harsh mistress, she sounds very realistic but the piano for the first time maintained a fixed position and had the bass authority of a piano. The second cut with flamenco music realistically reproduced the stamping of feet and the clapping of hands. The organ from the Lindenkirche Berlin, cut 7, had both the bass authority and soundstage that you would expect. My wife hates organ, but she came in to listen to this. Steve Ray Vaughan’s Tin Pan Alley was flat scary in its realism and soundstage. Finally, Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall presented specific locations of singers and instruments and clarity to the lyrics that I had never heard before. The boys’ choir voices in second portion were clean, separate, and realistic.

I should add that the 2900 had closed the gap between redbook and sacds, meaning that I really paid little attention to whether I was playing cds or sacds. Dvdas still proved inferior with but two exceptions, the Diane Krall dvda and Sinatra/Basie Live at the Sands. The 3910 changes all of this. Sacds are now clearly superior. You immediately feel the presence of the record venue when they come on. Certainly, some are superior to others, but the old Eva Cassidy Fields of Gold sacd on the Sony Ultimate Collection is so real to almost bring me to tears.

I have long characterized my sound as getting close to real. I have always resisted claiming I was 90 or 95 percent there. Given the improvement I am now hearing, all I can say is that I must have been no closer than 60 percent there in the past, because I am much closer now. On the Eva Cassidy sacd above, I probably could not have heard it as realistic had I been there as the mics are better positioned. I am not fool enough to believe that the future will bring better digital recreations of recorded events, but for now I doubt if any player can equal this.