Top ten tube amps

Absolutely any one of the audio note pre and power as wells as the integrateds. Some way behind would be Blue Circle and much further behind would be Jadis, canary audio, Manley, Music reference, CAry, Graff, all of which i have owned.

I can already see red in this thread.

Might i back up my choices of having audio note and blue circle at the top of the list by describing the sound of a few of the other amps in my list which are lower down but none the less good. Jadis is very musical but some colouration takes a way from the whole picture (JA80's). Canary CA339, refined good at most things but not particularly musical or emotionally involving as my top two. Music reference fast and a little lean tonally, again not quite making that step into musciality, but excellent in all other areas. I could go on, but the reason behind my top selections is because of the emotional connection as well as the hifi aspects. I think if people are going to make recommendations then a word or two about each one might also be helpful. There will be those who simply enjoy their equimwnt becasue of their ability to recreate good soundstaging or deatil, while others will be happy with the whole musical picture of the event that is taking place. I do not mean Naim route where pace and rhythm are taken to an extreme at the cost of all else, to the point where you can be left exasperated by their energy.

Swampwalker that is in my opinion the sad thing about the hifi retail world. There are so many manufacturers trying to get into the act that there is too much stuff for all dealers to stock. Even more unfortunate is that in my opinion the majority of these companies have designers who do not have a musical ear or indeed have never even played an instrument and work on the hifi aspects of the sound only. If you look at magazines over the years, up until the last one or two years reviewers have been fascinated by trying to get you to recreate the illusion, but totally ignored the emotional aspect of the music.I belive that this is at the heart of many enthusiasts needing to constantly change equipment. If they were connecting with the music at the emotional level then the hifi would matter less and analysis of the soundstaging or detailing would not be the concern. Instead of listening to bits of albums I bet you would be more likely to sit and listen to the whole lp without stopping to analyse the sound or change to an LP which might satisfy your need for realism for those few moments. I know I went through these stages in the same way reviewers are too now discovering what hifi should have always been about in the first place. This is why some of the older classic hifi sounds so good, Garrard, Rogers Leak etc etc, they started off building equipment sounding natural in the midrange and which emotionally connected. We some how all lost our way after that. Now more and more manufactures are beginning to under stand the concept of a 'musical' sounding system.

I wonder if the manufacturers and reviewers always new that but if they kept the musicality out of the equipment and aimed at getting you to just recreat amazing deatail and dynamics then you would always get bored quickly and want to move onto the next equipment. Interesting, were they clever enough to have conceved this in the same way that we have been fooled about Hydrogen cars as still being a new concept in development 20 years after the first working modwel was made, so that we would all continue to buy petrol?????????

Oz very well spotted it was the RM200, I think i had better listen to the RM-9. Thanks

Honest those are interesting observations. Car radios have always sounded very musical though not of 'hifi' quality. those tweeter sized speakers probably have great speed and the battery might be helping as well. However can only surmise that your concert hall experience must have been due to a poor performance on the day (unlikely) or the acoustics disrupting the actual performance you were meant to hear. With my arguments a highly musical sounding system should be able to differentiate between good and bad performances. Indeed, those that know certain pieces very well can differentiate talented musicians from less talented ones from the way the score is played and the amount of emotion exhibited by that individual or band.