I've had my Sig 30 for a few weeks now and in that time I've managed to put it through its paces in more ways than one. Excepting that in all this time I'm probably only just hovering around the 100 hour mark at the moment.
When I first hooked up the Siggie to my Gallo Ref 3's my immediate impression was "wow, I now understand why these speakers are so good at doing the disappearing act. Instruments no longer seemed to emanate from the speakers themselves; but rather from where they're supposed to naturally appear, depending on the recording in question.
In the room where I have the Gallos, which is long and narrow with a high ceiling and wooden floors I found the Gallos a real pain to set up to get the imaging as good as I could manage. That was before I installed the Siggie. It wasn't until I replaced my Teac with the Siggie that all that hard work seemed to pay off though. Apart from these observations concerning imaging, which were obvious, I didn't pay too much attention to the sound, since I knew the Siggie was at the start of its burn in. I just ran the radio through it all day. I couldn't help noting that the sound was overall more natural than prior to installing the Siggie.
Following this I went to the HiFi show in London where I encountered the new awesome Overkill system and met its designer Derek Wilson. Following that, Derek invited me to his place to hear the system again, and I couldn't resist taking the Siggie with me. He was in agreement with trying it on the Manger drivers which handle the critical frequencies from 300hz upwards.
The Overkill encore system has been reviewed in 6 Moons and it runs at $75,000. What he was demming in London though was a new system, which utilizes the Manger driver in conjunction with some fast SEAS drivers to handle the lower frequencies, down to about 35hz, in a gorgeous clear Acrylic open baffle. Yes, Open Baffle, folks and that's what drew me to his room at the show in the first place. I hadn't encountered the Manger drivers before, though, so these came as some surprise. These drivers are close to full range and sound smoother and more extended than other full range drivers, such as the Lowther that I like so much. In fact I believe, that on paper they go up to 35khz and in the other direction, extend to 85hz. Derek chooses to cross them over at 300hz, however, which is where the two SEAS drivers, run in parallel, takeover. The Manger driver is notoriously difficult to get working to its full potential. Derek seems to be the one to have achieved this with his elaborate and costly enclosures, which are detailed in the 6moons review. As others have noted on the Audiogon forum, it is also necessary to employ DSP to realize their full potential. Derek makes use of the DEQX for both digital crossover between the Mangers and the SEAS bass drivers, and also for room correction.
At both the show and his home Derek chose to use the Tom Evans Linear A, SET tube amp, on the Mangers and a Belles solid state amp for the bass. The result, in conjunction with the DEQX is awesome in terms of natural realism and no apparent distortion. The Tom Evans amp is around 5 times the cost of the Siggie, so Vinnies amp was up against some stiff competition and it hadn't reached the 100 hour mark yet.
One area where Vinnies' amp definately excelled was in robustness. I'm referring here to the plane journey from the South of France where I live to London. I was hoping to take it in the cabin with me, since it fitted neatly into my pilot case, with plenty of bubble wrap around it. Unfortunately the security staff at Nice saw the SLA batteries on the scanner and made me check it into the luggage hold. At the other end, I waited with trepidation until I spotted my precious Sig 30 tumble onto the baggage conveyor. When I got to my hotel, I hastily unwrapped it and hooked its charger up to the mains and everything seemed fine.
At Derek's place, we swapped the Tom Evans amp for the Sig 30 on the Manger drivers. No folks, I'm not going to report that it stomped all over the Tom Evans, as some of you may be hoping. Compared to the Tom Evans, it sounded a little thin and edgy. This was especially apparent on a particularly gravelly sounding male vocal. However, the magic of DSP is that you can fix anything (well almost). Derek had already gone to the trouble of doing room correction with the Sig 30 in place and creating a custom profile named "Red Wine Audio". After the initial result was a little disappointing, he tweaked this custom profile and ameliorated the edginess and the sound became richer and more natural.
We both concluded, that after this tweak the Sig 30 was not a huge drop from the Tom Evans and remember it probably only had around 70-80 hours on it by this stage.
We then did another swap over. This time putting the Tom Evans back on the Manger drivers and employing the Sig 30 to drive the bass units. At first Derek remarked that he found the bass a little "woolly". Again though, with a magic tweak on the DEQX this problem disappeared and Derek was now quite happy with the result on the bass.
As Srajan remarked in his review of the Overkill Encore system, using DSP in the form of a device like the DEQX, is the future. For those of us who grew up with Analog and the idea of keeping the signal as pure and simple as possible, the future can be a little scary though. As most of us are aware you can actually improve the sound by using DSP just as you can dramatically improve photos using Photoshop. However, I think it's important to bear in mind that DSP can't cure everything. As with a photo, if you start out with a crappy original, there's a limit to just how far you can go. If Vinnies' amp wasn't as good as it was, we would never have achieved the result we did on both the Manger drivers and the bass. If we had more time to tweak with the DEQX we might have got even better results.
The DEQX used in this configuration, as a pre-amplifier with analog outs, is also a limiting factor. As Srajan also noted in his Overkill review, the power supplies on the DEQX leave a lot to be desired. Overkill are also going to be offering a version with much improved power supplies and Derek feels the difference between that version and the standard version would exceed the differences between these high quality amps.
When I got my Sig 30 back home, again thankfully unscathed by the vagaries of baggage handling, I tried it out again in various configurations.
1. Using the Fi-Y (designed to complement the Fi-X) tube pre-amp into to the Sig 30 driving Gallo Ref 3's
2. Using my JADIS JPL tube pre-amp into the Sig 30 driving my Rethm 2nd Lowther DX4 speakers.
3. Using my Museatex BIDAT straight into the Sig 30, driving the Rethms.
Reverse this order and you have my clear preference. I really thought the Jadis pre-amp would be awesome into the Sig 30 and would be my preference, since it sounds wonderful into Jadis' own JA80 Class A Tube monoblocks; but no, the Sig 30, fed by the Bidat, driving my Rethms was my clear preference.
In this combination I found the Sig 30 met the criteria I'm always looking for. Which is to be able to forget you're listening to electronics. The sound was pure and natural stripped of any electronic artifacts that, may be termed , thin, dry, grainy, etc. The same comments apply when I use the Altmann DAC straight into the Sig 30 to drive my Gallos.
You may choose to use your Sig 30 with a pre-amp, tube or otherwise, to add flavor, obtain more gain, or to provide switching between different inputs. I can only echo, what I believe has been said here before, by Vinnie and others. Do please try the Sig 30 fed directly by a source first. If you need switching capabilities only, Vinnie now has a reasonably priced unit that won't detract from the purity of the sound.
geoff
