Not sure if this is the right thread, as I'm not on the tour. However, I finally have my monoblocks fully assembled as of late last night. I was able to put in about an hour of listening. My room arrangements have been moved around a lot in the last month or so, and my system is still not fully dialed in with the new arrangement. I will probably want to go back to the better acoustic arrangement in the future, despite the more "social" arrangement I have right now. Basically, I went from short-wall with symmetry and speakers out from walls to a long-wall arrangement with speakers closer to back wall but far from sidewalls. Expectedly, I'm having bass issues with my seating position too close to rear long-wall. Just thought I'd give a sense of what I'm dealing with as context.
Amps I have in house and have listened to quite a bit in the last year: Dayens Ampino, Onix SP3 MkII, modded Miniwatt S1. The rest of the system is comprised of MacMini 2010 w/SSD, DB Audio Tranquility SE, HornShoppe The Truth pre-buffer, and Tekton Lore speakers (98db, 30-30K in-room response).
I've been listening to the Ampino since the weather shifted a couple months ago and tubes didn't make much sense given the heat. It has a light, detailed, and somewhat sweet sound. My amp evolution went from Red Wine 30.2 (original, not LFP-V) to Wyred ICE monoblocks to the Miniwatt on Omega speakers and then Hornshoppe Horns, and finally to the Ampino on the same Horns. A strange evolution, to be sure, but I found the Ampino to be a huge step up and had a great balance of detail and sweetness, but not as much tonal depth as I craved. The Onix recently has been a tube exploration for me, and it definitely has more tonal richness along with lots more punch to the sound. However, over time, I felt like that punch and the tube effects diminished the light microdynamic details I really like a lot. The punch was also sometimes too much on my high efficiency and dynamic speakers.
Enter the NCore. With my brief listening so far, and in a non-ideal system at the moment, I think I was hearing a lot of the qualities others have cited. There was more depth of soundstage, and in a speaker position right now that presents significant headwinds in this dimension. I also heard a naturalness to instruments that bested the Ampino. I would not call the amps heavy on "air", but not lacking either. The air that was there and presented had more resolution to it and wasn't just "air", but really gave better sense of depth into the recording, the venue, whatever. I wouldn't call it recessed treble, just more of a three dimensional sound. But the instruments did seem to have more character. It does seem to add tonal richness and body to instruments above the Ampino, but without any diminished resolution of details (one of the Ampino's biggest strengths). Finally, the bass seemed weightier than with the Ampino, allowing me to run without my subwoofer with EQ and feel like I wasn't missing much. In my problematic bass situation, I did feel like the control over the bass was better and able to mitigate some of the boominess and one-note bass I have going on.
Of course, with only about an hour of listening, these are only very initial impressions. I'm quite curious to listen more for dynamics as time moves on. Dynamics are very important to me, and it might be that these are great in every dimension, but not as dramatic with dynamics as what I have enjoyed from other amps. Or maybe they'll excel there as well. The great thing about dynamics is that I have options elsewhere. I could go to a true preamp instead of my current buffer if I wanted more dynamics. I also am aware of an upgrade to the Tranquility SE output stage that improves dynamics, and I need to send that in to the shop for the upgrade.
All in all, it was a very promising start last night, and I'm really happy to have successfully pulled off my first somewhat DIY amp project.
