Hi-Fi
Choice, issue 260
Art
Dudley
column
Here's
something I've never done before:
Having finished a new product review,
I took the thing out of my system,
cleaned it off, packed it for shipping
... and then right before I called the
air freight company for a pickup I
unpacked it again so I could hear it
for just a little while longer.
It
is – or perhaps I should say they
are – a monoblock amplifier from
a company called Lamm Industries of
Brooklyn, New York, which is about
five hours from where I live. The
ML2.1 is a single-ended amp that uses
a Russian 6C33C indirectly heated
triode as its only output device per
channel. The amp can pass 19 unclipped
watts across an average load, and it's
capable of that much only because its
6C33C is regulated from here to next
Sunday and back again. (Each Lamm amp
has six tubes, fully three of which
are used as voltage regulators.)
But
the Lamms sell for $30,000 a pair,
which is considerably more than I earn
in half a year.
My
disdain for very expensive audio
products is no secret. I've never
encountered a $10,000-plus turntable I
could take seriously, musically or
aesthetically, and because the Alpen
boxes of 2010 will likely contain
giveaway players better than anything
we can buy today from dCS or Wadia,
pricey digital sources are even
sillier. But the Lamm ML2.1 amplifiers
– or, more to the point, the
extraordinary sense they make of every
record I feed them – made me
reconsider.
Imagine
a product that seems to scrape away
every bit of dirt from the musical
wave, leaving the attack and decay
components of notes sounding
particularly clear and purposeful. The
resulting presentation isn't
threadbare but rather rich with
believable tone and texture: Reeds,
strings, and skins have never sounded
so convincingly real in my home.
As
a recovering flat-earther I'm also
qualified to suggest that the Lamms do
a better than average job of keeping
timing and tunes correct. Of course
I've found that to be true of most
single-ended amplifiers, assuming
decent enough output trannies and
sensible loudspeaker matching. That a
single ML2.1 weighs over 70 pounds
speaks to the former; that it drives a
Quad ESL-989 in my moderately sized
room with only occasional compression
and absolutely no hard distortion
speaks to the latter, and admiringly
so.
Audio
jewelry this is not: While
impressively large, the ML2.1 is a
rather drab looking flat-black thing.
Similarly, its interior doesn't have
anything in the way of rare metals or
designer parts. But it's stunningly
solid and well-built, and I haven't
had a moment's trouble in the three
months it's been here. Three months
going on four, actually.
At
last count I owned four amplifiers
myself – an E.A.R. 890, a Naim NAP
110, a Fi 2A3, and an Audio Note Kit
One – and the Lamm monoblocks don't
render them obsolete or make them seem
any "worse" to me: I'm very
lucky to have what I have. But it's
also good to have something to stretch
toward. Perhaps Haliburton needs an
audio reviewer...?
M1.2
Reference
