I've owned and loved Music Reference EM7-series SET poweramps for maybe 2 years. I had bought a pair of 2.5WPC EM7-2.5s and converted one months ago to the 5WPC version. Many of you know Roger Modjeski as a great designer of tubed gear and also as a fellow who is very...er...pragmatic about parts quality. Perhaps the engineer in him says that once we reach a quality level of 'good', anything 'better' won't make the sound any better. Some of you know me as an incorrigible tweak and also a rather middle-range guy as to hearing acuity/golden-earness. I believe that every change to a music-reproduction system changes its sound, even if I can’t hear THAT difference, and I believe that sonic improvements to a system are cumulative. Usually I have to WORK to hear differences among, say, good-quality interconnects; I have friends who are MUCH-more skillful at hearing sonic differences than I...THEY are the Golden-Eared Audiofiles, not me. I talk a lot with Jeffrey Glowacki of Sonic Craft; he's become a friend since I started discussing capacitors with him several years ago. J-Glo, as I call him, is apparently a GEA and has advised me a lot on equipment upgrades. I can honestly say that J-Glo's advice has never turned out wrong, something I can’t say about anyone else, so he and I appear to value at least some of the same sonic attributes.
After buying and receiving a new pair of the 12-Watt-mono versions of Roger's EM7 amps, I retired the '2.5' and put the '5' into service driving the tweeters of my biamped, line-source speaker system while the new monoamps* drove the bass/MR. Seeing the guts of the new amps caused me to look at the 5 again; I discovered I had installed almost none of the few parts I had bought to upgrade them. Yesterday I replaced the cathode-bypass caps of the 1st-stage tube section with new BlackGates and added a 0.68/600 SoniCap II bypassing each output-stage powersupply cap. The amp still worked (!) and I reinstalled it in the system, let everything warm, settle, and get correctly biased. All week I had been evaluating candidates for new tweeters for my LS speakers and have heard dozens of times a particular cut of a Telarc SACD of Goldsmith film music, played thru that same EM7-5 amp. Last nite I started playing the ‘Star Trek’ cut of that SACD. Hmm...I thought, those cymbals sure sound good tonite. Wow, those trumpets sure are clean tonite. Ooh, that tubular bell sure sound better than normal...WAIT, there’s another quiet bell stroke I’d never heard! So back to the beginning. Yup, all that treble energy is definitely cleaner than before, and those cymbals actually have a slight tonality to them. WOW, I thought...I can actually hear these tiny differences for the 1st time in modern history.
I guess my lessons from all this is that parts quality does indeed make a sonic difference and that I can hear more of them than I thought. I haven’t decided if the latter is good.
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* An audio term I HATE is 'monoblock'. If a single-channel amp is a monoblock, then a 2-channel amp is a stereoblock, right? Pretty stupid, huh!?!?!?!?
