Integrated Amp Reviews

On the outside, the Tonmeister's facade includes four gold-plated control knobs labeled function (tuner, aux, CD1, CD2), record (source, tape), volume, and balance. Around back, things are similarly straightforward, with RCA jacks denoted Tuner, Aux, CD1, CD2, Tape-In, Tape Out, and Phono. There are three loudspeaker binding posts for each speaker lead, 8 ohm, and 4 ohm, and common. There's an IEC connector for power, two ground pins (signal ground and chassis ground), and an on/off switch. That's it.

Setup
The Tonmeister I reviewed was seen at the New York Audio Show, but it wasn't playing music there because it had been damaged in transit from the UK. After the show, it went to Audio Note technician Ben Jacoby, who made the necessary repairs; then it was sent here. It arrived at my place with the balance control reversed, but that didn't affect the Meishu's sweet sound.

I put the Tonmeister atop an Ikea Aptitlig bamboo board. I used the Audio Note UK AN-S4/M step-up transformer from my MC cartridges, into the Tonmeister's MM-only phono stage.

The amp's meager 8Wpc had no trouble driving my DeVore Orangutan O/96s, delivering smooth highs, a clear midrange that leaned toward lush, and a surprisingly taut yet rich low end. (These DeVores are nominal 10 ohm speakers with a specified sensitivity of 96dB/W/m; don't try this at home with your 82dB-sensitive, 4 ohm floorstanders.) I listened mostly, but not entirely, to vinyl. (It isn't called the Meishu CD or Meishu Stream 300B after all.)

Listening
One recent autumn evening, I came across three young folks playing laptops and a small keyboard at the corner of Bleecker and Lafayette Streets. This band's name is Your Throat. They drenched me in Mellotron-like waves, circular melodies, layers of gassy noise, and deep undertows of oily bass beats—all this from a single 12" driver in a stage-monitor wedge. I was so engrossed that I stood for 30 minutes in 40° weather, time and place suspended as I fell under their music's spell. (Did they have recordings to sell? No. A Bandcamp page? A website? Anything? No.)

The Audio Note Meishu Phono 300B Tonmeister affected me in a manner similar to Your Throat. Its performance was whole cloth, transparent, with superquiet, black backgrounds. It was texturally and tonally beautiful. Mesmerizing, providing new insight into familiar recordings, resolving previously unheard details. The Tonmeister made me do what every passionate audiophile wants to do: forget about judgment and audiophile virtues and just listen. It did that in ways that only my Shindo Laboratories components and a few other products have done, all of them lovingly crafted, small-batch music-remaking machines, the best I've heard in-house.

The Tonmeister reproduced recordings I know intimately as if I, or maybe they, were waking from a long sleep. The amp's transparency, to tube-choice, sources, and recordings, rendered from every vinyl LP what sounded to me like original intent—what the musicians, producer, and mastering engineer conceived in the studio—though I realize that's impossible to know. What I'm sure of is that each recording I played through the Tonmeister had more depth, physicality, and flow than I've previously heard from any variation of my Greenwich Village rig. I've had this kind of transcendent listening experience only in a few select rooms at audio shows and friends' systems.

"Having listened to this audio combo system myself," noted my listening buddy, hi-fi scholar and technical whiz Steven Cohen, "what I can say is that this system served the music exceedingly well. That's why we'd keep coming back to listen more, and in a sense, that is the point of having such a well-balanced system, that it naturally gives you a great shot at hearing what the artists and producers intended, and then some." Exactly. Well said.

I could continue to blather about the Tonmeister's macroscale charms, its rich tonality, its ability to cast a sweeping soundstage, its force, potency, energy. But the devil is in the details, so here are a few of those.

My 1958 pressing of The Poll Winners Ride Again! (Contemporary S7029) is a tone-saturated, superimmediate performance captured brilliantly by engineer Roy DuNann. This LP always sounds fantastic, with flow, swinging dynamics, and abundant detail. Via the Tonmeister, Shelly Manne's drums and cymbals bristled with texture and energy; Barney Kessel's sometimes corny guitar escapades were physical and unruly; Ray Brown's upright bass filled my room, bowing and blooming beyond the speakers, right into my stomach. I felt and heard the full span of Brown's instrument, in both frequency and dynamic terms.

L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande's performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird (Speakers Corner/Decca SXL 2017), conducted by Ernest Ansermet, walloped me with a dense, swirling wall of sound, its large soundstage populated by visceral, nearly-3D images. I was riveted by the orchestra's every nuance, the subtlety and emotion of the piece, from those ominous strings and gentle percussion (emanating from the Meishu's dead-quiet background) to the textural shading of each instrument in space. It captured the essential mood and message of every recording.

Another exceptional recording, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins's Volume 1 (Blue Note BLP 1542), is a rambunctious workout by Rollins, trumpeter Donald Byrd, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Gene Ramey, and drummer Max Roach. On "Decision," the Tonmeister captured Rollins's pungent tone and Byrd's buttery textures right down to the spit blowing through the instruments, live sounding, immediate, and layered in ambient space. Ramey's bass was taut and full, his fingers almost visible as they scaled the strings. This recording sounds like live music, bouncing off the walls of Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack studio, but that sense was amplified by the Tonmeister.

A final observation: the Tonmeister doesn't do air. There's no sense of diaphanous treble breathing a halo of iridescence around instruments or voices. I didn't miss it: It may not do air; instead it does flesh. As is surely clear if you read this far, I found the amplifier's rich, brawny, physical reproduction more than satisfying.

But then, I'm used to it: My Shindo Labs amplifier and preamp don't do air, either. The Tonmeister is more resolving than my Shindos, has tighter low end, and is more transparent than my tubed Shindo separates. It's just as communicative as the Shindos. None of them do air.

Conclusion
I only talked about vinyl, because I had my best experiences with vinyl. But I also used the Meishu with my HoloAudio May DAC. The combination was rich and fluid and brought me many hours of musical satisfaction and surprise.

In 2011, Art Dudley wrote in his review of the Audio Note Jinro integrated of "an abundance of that often-noted-yet-never-explained 'SET sound' that allows solo voices and instruments to stand musically and spatially proud of the rest of the mix." That, certainly, is part of what I heard with this Meishu amplifier. It framed every recording within its unique space with meatiness and viscosity, drive and dynamics, deep tone and texture.

Words fail to express the satisfaction I derived listening to music through this expensive Audio Note integrated amplifier. I've got nothing bad to say about it—except for the air thing, if you care about that. I detected no (other) anomalies, artifacts, sonic peculiarities, or outright shortcomings. The Tonmeister, together with the Audio Note SUT I auditioned it with, took what I hear from my vinyl collection and made it better, portraying each performance as a singular, unique event occurring at a particular time and place, its secrets revealed.

If there's a better integrated amplifier in the world than the Audio Note Meishu Phono 300B Tonmeister, I haven't heard it yet.