[sjh500]

I just discovered the Aronov ls-960 stereo amp and am wondering if anybody has heard it? I read that the bass is tremendous, but how does it do everything else? Looking for a tube amp that does not soften the top end, basically neutral. Also a little concerned about the hum in the transformers that I have read about, does it effect the music? The other two that I am looking at would be the KR 18 bsi and a fully modded Golden Tube Se 40 special edition, mods done by Sonic Craft. By chance has anybody compared all of these aa? Thanks for the input. By the way, I will be using the amp to drive a pair of Reference 3a De Capos.

[chgolatin2]

  hmmmm, never heard of it personally.  Where is it manufactured?  Who sells it, where did you find it?

[sjh500]

Not in production anymore, but they were made in the US.

[Imperial]

hmmmm, never heard of it personally.  Where is it manufactured?  Who sells it, where did you find it?

Yakov Aronov, the owner I believe of a electronics&repair shop in California made these amps together with his sons back from say 1990
to just about 2000 when they stopped making the amps.
The shop still exists, and I believe that there are some parts still available (but this must be dwindling by now), but since all I'm writing now is off my memory and from stuff..read over the years.
You had a 60w stereo amp (ls 960), a pre (can't remember what it was called), then a set of monoblocks 110
/120w something. ls 9100?, was it a 60w integrated as well? Not sure.
I think these amps are powerfull like solidstates at low freqs and good like tube amps should be but neutral and not soft at all in the midrange and up top.
The powertransformers can buzz, I'm sure this can be rectified with a dc blocker or what have you really.
There are some amps as far as I know also in the nordic countries, the never last long on the used market and gets sold really quick.
I believe they generally are sort of based on Dynaco so they should be an easy fix for any repairshop should that need ever come up.
I believe they are known to actually not fail that often either, so rugged stuff you could say.
webpage went down ca 2003'ish??? something (www.aronovamps.com)

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I found this now:
http://www.audiocircuit.com/index.php?c=ARO&cc=920#

Imperial

[Niteshade]

I saw one or two on Ebay. They had one speaker tap- most likely for 8 ohms.

[bpape]

Sturgis has a pair of the Aranov Monoblocks.  Maybe he'll chime in and give you a good idea.  He's running them on Merlins.

Bryan

[sjh500]

Anybody Someone has to have heard and compared these amps?

[CSI]

I heard an Aronov integrated amp at a So. Cal dealer in the 90's. It had a very warm sound and really good bass control for a tube unit, as I recall - better than the VTL's the dealer was featuring at the time. He did warn me that the chassis grounding was a little iffy, creating a serious shock hazard. Hopefully, they fixed that on later models.