Absolute Sound Review - Jan 2009HPs Workshop.
The Bryston 28B Mono AmplifierFor about 30 years, the Canadian electronics firm, Bryston has been the darling of the professional sound set. Its electronics are unconditionally stable – you never heard of a Bryston blowing up, did you, even when heavily punished. And who else dares guarantee their products for t-w-e-n-t-y years?
Yes, it’s all solid-state, all the time. And each of its older amps sounds just like its brothers sonically, excepting perhaps the fringe benefits from higher and lower power outputs. Adored by the Flat Earth crowd (all amps sound a like mainly because of its exceptionally linear frequency response, Bryston hasn’t been the darling of the high falutin’ High End crowd (though it has been of the professional crowd). And, faluting or not, that certainly includes me, yr. Humble reviewer.
But, last January during the Las Vegas audio orgies, and amidst the esoterica on display at T.H.E. Show there, I went in to hear what Magnepan was up to at the Alexis Park. Therein, the company had assembled an unusual arrangement of their smaller single panel speakers, the MMC-2 and DW-1 woofers. A brief recap:
"There were two center channel panels (that canted out from a flat position on the wall) left/right matching panels – all of planar design and in this application, motorized for the canting, as well as planar woofer panels, under what looked like, and was for all practical purposes, end tables.. …You had to hear it to believe it: a terrific spread, and for once, quite wide dynamic contrasts, and from a Maggie no less, plus a midrange and high end lower in distortion than any of the company’s smaller speakers I’ve heard”Little did I know, at the time, what was driving this system and what accounted for the extra transparency, dynamic quickness and low distortion I heard. Given Magnepan’s long-time association with Audio Research, I assumed I was hearing its tubed gear. But, oh no, said Wendell Diller, Maggie’s front man and marketing manager, I had been hearing Bryston solid-state electronics (!) Boggle, boggle went the brain.
One thing led to another, and, some months later, I received, from James Tanner of, Bryston, a pair of the 1000-watt 28B amps their cutting edge design, and the forerunner of future Bryston amps to come. Out of the box and with no warmup at all, they sounded impressive. A solid state first. Little did I know what heights they were going to attain.
What first struck me were the two top octaves, which were sweet (unusual for solid-state), and when I say “sweet” here, I mean in the sense that music is at its best. Tubed gear can achieve with such naturalness, but not usually this cleanly and purely. It was an extension into the ionosphere (further out than the best tubed units), yet, with no added harmonic fatness, of either the liquid, or dry varieties.
I expected, given the thousand-watt rating (into eight ohms) slam-bang bass, but hardly an extended bass as articulated as those highs without any special “character” for my ear to hang onto. Almost always, when the two bottom octaves are reproduced, there is an audible coloration, not necessarily, mind you, a bad or untruthful one, but a “character”, not unlike that exhibited by low frequencies in different concert halls. To wit, it can be “fat”, “dark”, “lean”, “boomy” – or even boxy.
The 28B lets you in. That is to say, you can and do hear past the little cues by which other amplifiers notify you of their presence in the listening experience. Put another way: it doesn’t give you a peg to hang your aural cap on. Or, let me say, not one I can yet identify. Indeed at first I thought it a little bland because of the lack of those tiny colorations the ear, at the deepest level, pegs onto.
When you come across a component that is better in some significant ways than what you’ve heard before, the experience tends to derail the train of acute insights, critical or otherwise. For those, you sometimes have to wait until you’ve heard its better.
The noise floor is lower than any other amplifier in my experience. And the power output pretty much makes ridiculous the idea that this amp will clip at any less than deadly listening level. What that means is that you will (and do) get a sense of increased dynamic range. This means you will be able to hear gradations at the soft end of the dynamic spectrum, the discrete differences between the piano and the pianissimos. The same is true at the other end of the spectrum because of its refusal to clip and thus distortion the gradations between the distinct stages of loudness, you can hear the dynamic shadings, sans distortion, between a simple forte, and the several gradations between that and the fortissimo. Without amplifier clipping, even electrostatics can sound comfortable at more intense levels (clipping is a horror on an electrostatic). You might analogize between the amp’s power and a huge engine in a sports car: there is greater ease at every output level, and especially those when both car and amp might normally be coasting. (It’s more like sailing, actually, than coasting.)
Is there an overall “character” or slight cast of tonal color? Well, the 28B certainly isn’t dark (or yin) sounding, nor is it awash in a kind of dry whiteness. Or dry anything. There are no textures. I know this because we exposed it, in listening sessions, to the big Scaena system, the new Nola Viper Reference II speakers, and the wondrous (and utterly revealing) JansZen One Hybrid electrostatic and mated it with front-end components of all sorts, from the Conrad-Johnson ART III line stage to the McIntosh 2301 line stage, and sources LP and CD. In the case of the JansZen, there was a purity to the sound I am not sure I’ve heard from reproduced music before, and I don’t mean “purity” in the sense of something added, but rather in the sense of much subtracted. The JansZen, like the Bryston 28, gives you no obvious hook for your ear to latch onto. You find yourself almost forced, that is, left to listen to the music per se. Understand that most components have little tics and quirks, usually all but inaudible, that the ear, that supreme scanning device, attaches itself to and lets the brain think “aha, that isn’t real; it’s unreal, that is, reproduced”. And understand that I’m not saying that I find myself in the presence of the real thing here, but free to focus on the music itself, which still means you’ll hear the upstream currents and eddies of coloration. Oddly enough, your first impression might be that the amp sounds a bit “bland”, but then, as the transients, the dynamics, the harmonics suspend themselves there in space, the amazement begins.
As the amp came into its own, it revealed as many gradations in the recreation of a soundstage and hall, as it did in the dynamic domain. The 28Bs can and do delineate different “depths” on the stage and so with, what is for me, a unique precision. Not all stages and halls are shaped the same way. On the stage, if an amplifier reproduces front-to-back depth, it either reproduces a great deal or a sense of space without dimensional images on that stage, hence a kind of flattening effect takes place. Because the images are flat, the depth, with some units, sounds “enhanced” or slightly artificial, as in doctored. With this Bryston, you can hear the teardrop shape of Orchestra Hall (pre-renovation), the deep boxy shape of Symphony Hall in Boston, but with a real sense of the structural character of the stage. I am not saying that other amps don’t give you a general feel for the sounds of these halls, they do. But the Bryston goes a step further, and lets you hear the side walls (an amazement if you listen to the Mercury recordings made with the Eastman Rochester group), and even the positioning, in height and in distance from the back wall of the risers upon which some of the players sit. And a better sense of the ambient space in front of the stage. (To wit, Carnegie is shaped like a bowl; Symphony Hall like a shoebox.) And it does this in a perfectly natural fashion, so natural you may not at first be aware of it. It is not a “high definition” enhancement, it is the very opposite, a lack of that, a cutting away of another scrim between the mikes and the musicians.
These observations – and I add an important “so far” are the result of several months of intensive listening, under virtually every circumstances and condition I could summon. And I don’t think I know all there is to know about the 28B’s sound. And so you can be assured it is a subject to which I shall, perhaps in bits and pieces, return.
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