Bel Canto EVO 200.2

sws2 piqued my interest in the marsh line of amps and it just so happened that a friend/dealer had his line in. so i asked to demo one and i got to take home the a200s. while the marsh was very nice in some ways, it was terribly harsh sounding. i had another fellow audiophile over and we listened to both switching them in and out after listening time and time again to certain tracks. the conclusion we came to was that although the marsh had 95% of the low level detail of the evo, its ambience and soundstage just wasn't quite there. also, as noted before, there was very noticeable sibilance and the midrange seemed real edgy. depending on the system used, this may be a desired trait. in my system, the harshness of the top end and the edgy midrange didn't bring the best out of my ribbon driver. i would imagine in a system in which the speakers were very inefficient and in which the top end seems darker and or more lush then accurate and real detailed. not to say the marsh won't perform well in any other system, but in my experience with it i wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking for most of the positive aspects of the evo. i would also like to agree with morasp above, if this technology and the effort to build them is so cheap and i quote from a poster on another forum "simple for any DIY'er" why hasn't any other company jumped on the bandwagon seeing the potential for sales with its demand, after all there is a 3 week back order on the evo.

I want to comment about Vintgeguru's experiences with the Marsh as I can only assume the Marsh was not fully broken in. Mine took about 150 hours to totally break in and was rough the first 50 to 60 hours. I am not experiencing any harshness or brightness currently. I use the analysis plus speaker cables which is the same cable I used with the EVO. The Marsh clearly has more detail, less dryness and is better overall in my system. I have to think others have had similar experiences with the EVO as at times there are 6 or 7 for sale at one time on Audiogon.

Just so you know, we at BCD have a pair of SL3s in our listening room and they play to this speaker's highest performance.

At BelCanto, they told me that the EVO200.2 is not suited to drive speakers with low impedance. Any experiences?

Just wanted to pass on some info. Have heard this amp in 3 different places and in all 3 a similar theme was that power conditioning is more important with this amp than any other they've had. I read an article somewhere that implied that due to the digital architecture this amp needs clean power to sound its best, and this seems to have been backed up by the dealers/owners I've spoken to. So make sure you've got clean power before making any final conclusions on this amp. Also, using them in monoblock pairs was also said to bring this amp to a much higher level. For what it's worth.

Tim