OPT question: AirTight w/ Tamura vs Marant 8B

Interesting question. I know Mr. Mura, the designer of Air Tight products. His amps are excellent and the output transformers are very good as well. They are beautifully built and do sound very good. Before he died I got a chance to spend an hour on the phone with Sid Smith a few years before his death. I have a soft spot in my heart for the Marantz 8. I have fixed them and love bench testing them. I asked him about his transformer design and about how he settled for the one he used in the 8B. He told me, for prototyping purposes, he himself built 45-50 different iterations of the output transformer. He potted them himself and listened to each and every one before he decided on the one he used. He was a bit upset because he was not consulted for the commemorative version. Designing output transformers is very much an art form unto itself. He never wrote anything down. I asked if he would, because with his knowledge it would be a shame to loose all that knowledge if God forbid something happened to him. He said I don't care, when I go, it goes with me. I can tell you that his output transformers are amazing. I've never seen better square waves come out of an amp as I see with the 8B. Some manufacturers cheat by designing the transformer to ring a bit at high frequencies making you think it has wider bandwidth, but it doesn't. That ringing is non-linear and is therefore not useable frequency response. Marantz 8B transformers really don't ring at high frequencies so all that high frequency bandwidth is useable. A remarkable man, and a remarkable transformer.

..and carbon comp. resistors tend to be a lot more noisy, i.e. thermal noise. There is no such thing as the right or wrong amplifier. It's not that black and white. Each person hears differently, their audio system is different, and their listening environment is different. That's what makes the world go round.

I believe Mr.Mura the designer and owner of Airtight also owns Tamura Transformer. Also, the circuit topology of the Marantz 7 is the same as the McIntosh C-22 which is the same as the ARC SP-6. The differences are in the components used, and the power supply, which can make a huge difference. For the most part, all these preamps use three 12AX7's for the line stage, and three 12AX7's for the phono stage. The last tube in both stages are used as cathode followers. Please note that the later series of SP-6E became the SP-8 which had a tube regulator and started using 6922's.