[TomekZ]

About a week ago, Vinnie R. sold some Gainclones that he had laying around, finding them a lesser amp than his Clari-T, I guess. But I lucked out and saw his ad and bought them. Well, they are impressive. During the past few months, I've had about five Gainclones and a 47 Labs Shigaraki powering my Jordan JX92s drivers in transmission lines. And these Gainclones are the most musical, the best. They are based on the chipamps.com BrianGT circuit boards, but with special modifications by Vinnie of Red Wine (I've another BrianGT amp which even uses Blackgate caps). How these are most special of all the Gainclones--these have the most open, clear and full midrange, very tube-like; the treble of orchestral violins (where in I'm most picky) are so sweet, making even poor recordings easy to listen to. At first I thought they captivated me because of their tube like fulness, but then knew that openness and detail were still so much there. These are in the same black box as other Red Wine products, which is compact and self effacing. When selling these, Vinnie made note that they were not prototypes for a future Red Wine product, which is too bad for everyone else. His belloved Clari-T must be magically better than the stock Tripath amps. But because my fav speakers are the not-so efficient Jordans, I'll stick with these magical Gainclones.  ~Tom

[Vinnie R.]

About a week ago, Vinnie R. sold some Gainclones that he had laying around, finding them a lesser amp than his Clari-T, I guess. But I lucked out and saw his ad and bought them. Well, they are impressive. During the past few months, I've had about five Gainclones and a 47 Labs Shigaraki powering my Jordan JX92s drivers in transmission lines. And these Gainclones are the most musical, the best. They are based on the chipamps.com BrianGT circuit boards, but with special modifications by Vinnie of Red Wine (I' ...

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your feedback...I'm glad you love them!  

I know this may sound funny to you, but the Clari-T-Amp sounds like is has a very similar about of power to those Gainclones (with my 6-ohm 90dB speakers).  

And yes, I'll take a Clari-T-Amp (stereo Clari-T or even better...Clari-T monoblocks)  over those Gainclone Monoblocks any day,    but you still got a sweet deal and they do sound good.  

Enjoy!

Vinnie

[JLM]

Tomek,

Six gainclones plus the 47 Lab amp now??     Isn't there a law in Wisconsin against that?     One for each day of the week!  Lets hope that they don't start breeding or achieve some sort of critical mass and cause a giant cheese meltdown across the midwest.

[Dmason]

And the BrianGT amp has a similar genetic to the Peter Daniel amp, which is the same amp as the $1,500 AudioZone amp, which is a current darling of the bling bling audio jewellry crowd, garnering rave reviews wherever it goes. But the Audio Zone sports machining. "Boeing Audio"

And the ClariT ~kills~ Gainclones, to those who have had the opportunity to hear both. The ClariT could be viewed as the audionic Heyflick Limit of Gaincloning   ......  

Tom: Why don't you try the ClariT with the Zhorn and report?

[Wind Chaser]

I just ordered a Clari T with sub outputs to mate with Jordan JX92s. More power would have been nice, but I'll take the humble truth over watts any day.  Besides, my last amp (Decware Zen) only yielded 1.8 watts per channel, so the Clari T is sort of like a muscle amp in comparison, a real graduation in terms of power output.

Tomek...

I noticed you just sold your Zen B; would you care to comment on the differences between the Zen and the Gainclones?

[TomekZ]

Lovers of tube power amps, often talk about "tone", meaning the color of a voice or instrument, the personality; well, gainclone chip amps do this better than most solid state in my experience. And the Vinnie R. gainclone is uncanny in this regard. The Decware amp is a truly fine tube amp, having personally owned the SE84b & c and the SE34i. As far as a narrow band of the midrange is concerned the tube amps are more liquid, but not as detailed as the gainclones; and the bass, you know of tube amps, never seems to have the impact of solid state, but with the right speaker, like a Fostex back loaded horn speaker, a tube amp, because of its low damping factor, does make for a nice and weighty bass. But the Jordan JX92s driver does fine with a good solid state damped bass; thus I like my gainclones.Why don't I venture with the Clari-T? Well, I've given time (though only in days at a time) to a Griffin Powerwave and a Sonic Impact and they inhibited my emotional connection to the music; but I've turned my brother and a good friend onto the tripath amps and they listened for months regularly, that was until I started collecting gainclone chip amps: both went to a chip amp then, religating their tripath to a lesser place. Now I do appreciate the positive qualities of a lead acid battery. Having both  a S. Nixon Tube DAC+  and an Ack! dAck! 1.3 , I find that the lead acid powered dAck! is better at handling orchestral crescendos. Many audio electronics do compress and homongenize the individual voices of an orchestral in full tilt and, undeniably, the powersupply has much, perhaps the most, to do with this. By the way I presently only have four gainclones (well technically five, since I've a Nixon kit which I made, though it never played music, just did a firecracker capacitor explosion, fun).