I am probably the first person to have bought a Ref 9 SE v2 in Great Britain.
Before upgrading from my humble Unison Unico (but I have owned a fair share of respectable stuff in the past) I auditioned a lot of the most hyped amps in this side of the pond for the same price braket, including Krell, Primare, Bryston, Bel Canto, Moon, McIntosh, EAR Yoshino, Meridian, and a few more. To my ears there was not even a remote competition: the NuForce were in a totally different league.
I don't have the same experience of many here, but I have own my share of equipment in the last 30 years and I have been going to hifi shows constantly. I was always thinking that amps at any price point were a compromise, I never find one that for my taste was totally right (far from that). I listen to an extremely broad palette of music and these are my findings:
- Some really good tube amps have a marvellous tonality and magic mids when listening to simple acoustic music or classic, but every single one that I have heard fall apart whenever things get more dynamic or electric and in a lot of cases bass get slow and muddy
- A few very good (and very expensive) solid state amps get the bass and dynamic much better, but mids and highs are often grainy, dry, or uninvolving. Very few SS amps get close to what I wanted, but they are extremely expensive, bulky, heavy and generate tonnes of heat.
With the NuForce I have finally got something that is not a compromise, or an amp that forces me to listen just to a certain kind of music. To my ears and for the sort of music I listen to it is the only amp that totally satisfy me, at any price point.
PS: in this thread I have seen a couple of the nastiest people I have met in forums
