I spoke with Merrill and he warned me that "more air is sometimes more smear."
My experience is totally the opposite. Moe air to me means more silence and thus less smearing.
From all the years I spent comparing the Aesthetix Callisto Sig line stage and Io phone stage to other products I brought in for comparison, and then later with the Aria WV5 preamp, more air implied less smear and there was silence between the notes that did not exist before. This is most notably clear with piano.
With the Aesthetix pieces, you get a lot of bloom and thus much smearing. With the Aria, the addictive bloom is reduced as you can now so much more hear the strike of a subsequent piano key that was clearly masked before. I tried so many solid state preamps out there and none come close to the Aria in this regard of the 3D portrayal and follow-on delineation. You get a lot of air with solid state line stages, but sadly you get a much flatter portrayal of space compared to the top tier of tube products.
The above qualities were exactly where the Lampizator B6 excelled over my long-time reference, the Manley Ref DAC. And I went through even more DAC comparisons to this than line stages …. many of which were "highly-rated" solid state DACs but ultimately boring as hell 3D performance.
To achieve such results can take many months or more of system tuning, exhaustive tube rolling efforts, and finding that magical IC between the line stage and amp. The easiest way for me to destroy a ton of performance that I have achieved in my system is to put in any one of 95% of ICs out there in this link. And smearing is a major issue with cables in this link.
