Most transparent amp you've heard?

OK, here is what transparent means.

about 8 years ago i fell in love with the Tenor OTL 75 watt integrated monoblocks. at the time i owned a Mark Levinson #32 preamp which i considered very highly. one day i compared the integrated passive volume control in the Tenors to the #32. the resistor based passive in the Tenors sounded way less veiled and much more immediate and alive. Goodby Levinson.

next i wanted remote volume control; so i purchased a Placette RVC and tried the Tenor's thru the Placette RVC. i could hear no difference between listening direct thru the Tenor's volume control and adding the Placette RVC even if i used the line out from the volume attenuator.....in other words the Placette was transparent to the source.

it gets better.

it turns out you can stack 5 Placette RVC's end to end and you cannot hear any difference between these 5 stacked RVC's and only one of them, or none of them.

the Placette RVC was truely transparent to the source.....it changes nothing (or rather my ears could not detect any difference).

that is my definition of transparent.....what other audio electronics could do that?

btw; transparency is not the end all factor of sonic bliss; but it is an important issue.

the most transparent amp i've heard is the darTZeel NHB-108 using the darTZeel NHB-18NS battery powered preamp and connected with the 'zeel' BNC cables.

the dart is a solid state design but it's sound is like music. no solid state sterility, grityness or upper mid-range glare, that wonderful solid state high frequency extension but with a sweetness instead of hardness. the dart also has that 'breath of life' of tubes without the darkness or roundness. with a very short signal path, minimum number of output devices and no global negative feedback you have a 'see-thru' quality, delicate nuance, naturalness, and an extremely low noise floor yet excellent micro-dynamic energy.

the dart does not impose a character on the music; instead it gets out of the way and achieves an amazing level of transparency and it's sound is the sound of real music.

the closest thing to a darTZeel in transparency in my experience would be the very best OTL tube amps; my favorite of which is the Tenor OTL and then the Atmasphere.

i have not heard everything out there.....