Spectron Musician III - Can anyone comment on it?

Hi Rafael,

Not yet. The guy does good quality work at a reasonable price so he's swamped with orders. I also made a couple of changes to the original design. I heard of a couple of very highly regarded preamps using DHTs so I asked Nicholas what he thought of this. He said no problem, my own preamp uses a 45 tube driven by 6922. He adapted his preamp for the use of 6FQ7, electrically similar to 6SN7 and sat down and listened to pure 6SN7 vs 6FQ7 driving a 45. 6SN7 was darker, 45 was fuller sounding, better upper extension and more microdetail.
So now my preamp will be a choke coupled 6SN7 driving a 45 conservatively, the output transformer lowers the gain to 4dB in low gain mode or 8dB in high gain mode, I have 2 pairs of XLR outs and 2 pairs of SE outs , output impedance around 50 ohms with both XLRs used, which is very low.
The other thing is that the remote control unit didn't work out as expected and manual was significantly better sounding, so that's what I chose.
Will let you know how it sounds driving the Spectrons in monoblock mode.

romandoc

"Will let you know how it sounds driving the Spectrons in monoblock mode"

Thank you very much - post your impressions
All The Best
Rafael

My second Mark II amp (for monoblock)showed up and I'm beginning the 250-400 hr process of breaking it in. It's on a separate system running 24/7 with mono out of phase XLO break-in tracks running continuously via Squeezebox and a set of speakers facing each other, with thick comforter over them....works darn well, with little in-phase noise leaking out, even at decent gain levels.

I'll report back when I officially go monoblock. I'm geeked.

Well, tonight I hit the 100 hr mark of break-in for my 2nd Mark 2 amp. The y-adapters that showed up were too short anyway, so i have to be patient and let the amp break in and wait for the right length XLR y-adapters to be shipped. Any monoblock users out there hazard a guess as to when it would be proper to move the 2nd amp into monoblock mode? I guess I'm being overly cautious cuz it's not like when a biamped amp moves in; that amp can integrate in as the bass amp or whatever and likely not show its differences..unlike the monoblocks where one is distinctly left channel, and one right channel. Am I being too picky? thanks
Ted

My y-adapters from Synergistic Research arrived earlier than expected so I set up my 2nd amp (now with 200+ hrs of burn-in disc signal) next to my first, flipped the switches, rewired the speaker cables as per instructions, and voila, the monoblocks live! In a word, stunning!!

I have been knocked out by the sound of the stereo Musician III Mark 2, but I was not prepared for the increase in clarity, dynamics, resolution, soundstage depth and just an overall ease to the presentation. It's quite a combo when you use dynamics and ease in the same sentence. I told a buddy that the analogy is a pickup basketball game where one team is basically standing around in their dress shoes, suits and ties, yet still beating a group of youngsters 40-0. Total control, not a drop of sweat.

I did uncover an interesting anomaly. although I read on the Spectron site that the conventional wisdom was to use each amp's right channel as the red/positive side, I paid little attention, thinking it was a coin flip decision. Hwoever, there was a definite phase issue when set up the other way (left channel of each amp positive and normal phase). Why? Simon reminded me that it had to do with AC polarity, and that the majority of installations would have AC polarity set up correctly for right/pos, left/neg and not the other way around. And he was right (pun not intended).

The Spectron monoblocks are truly state of the art IMO. Combined with the rest of my system, I now have a Hubbell telescope that is beaming back warm rich colors of the universe, and I'm able now to tweak the rest of the system to discover subtle cosmic nuances heretofore unknown. It's very very cool...and musical as heck.