Brilliant Corners

In comparison with the Manley Steelhead RC phono stage I've been using, the Tron produced richer, more colorful images and simply sounded more beautiful. But it omitted some of the ambient information and long decays that the considerably more expensive Manley extracted from my records. After Ken and I listened to the title track from an early stereo pressing of Miles Davis's Someday My Prince Will Come (Columbia CS 8456) on the Manley, we switched to the Tron. "The halo around Davis's trumpet is gone," Ken remarked, and sure enough, the distinctive reverberant presence of Columbia's 30th Street studio was no longer as audible. The air around the instruments didn't sound as charged, nor were they as audibly separate. And, compared to the Manley, the Tron's images were not as billowy or large. Do note that these omissions became obvious only during direct comparison.

The Manley Steelhead, which uses a transistor instead of a transformer in its first gain stage, makes for a wonderful reference because of its balanced sound and (at least) excellent performance in every sonic and musical category, as well as its unparalleled flexibility. The Tron Convergence Signature is a more niche product—a glorious-sounding companion to low-output moving coil cartridges for listeners who value tone, presence, and beauty above all. I could live with it quite happily forever.

PrimaLuna EVO 100 Tube Phonostage
I've never met PrimaLuna's Herman van den Dungen, but he must be as stubborn as a stuck zipper. Just look at the way he spells "phonostage," smushing the two words together. And who else would make a nearly 30lb phono stage with 10 (!) tubes in it?

Despite PrimaLuna's rather humdrum case design, one look at the EVO 100 (footnote 2), which costs $3695, reveals that it's a decidedly out-there product. Its chassis resembles that of the superb EVO 400 line stage that sat on the shelf above it but is only half as wide, and it has the same huge (for a phono stage) power transformer. Pop off the bottom cover and you can take in the neat point-to-point construction. The PrimaLuna's side panels contain a switch for power and another for setting capacitance loading. On the front are knobs that allow a user to select from three settings for gain and five for resistive loading (ranging from 50 to 500 ohms), and buttons for muting and for choosing between moving magnet and moving coil modes. Also visible from the front are eight tubes: two 5AR4 rectifiers, two EL34s for power supply filtering, and four 12AX7s under spring-loaded metal shields for RIAA decoding and amplification. And get this—a little metal door held in place by four fasteners on the back of the unit reveals a Faraday cage holding two more tubes: a pair of 6922s that provide additional gain for the moving coil section. The whole thing feels as elaborate and whimsical as a dollhouse.

An all-tube phono stage—one without transformers or transistors providing some of the gain—is a decidedly rare animal. According to PrimaLuna importer Kevin Deal, the EVO 100 was a collaboration between van den Dungen and Jan de Groot, with inspiration from ex-Goldmund designer Marcel Croese, the man behind the EVO 400 (which itself uses a whopping eight tubes, including two rectifiers). Deal also told me that one of the main design objectives was lowering noise, which explains the Faraday cage, the tube shields, and the rubber mounts for the tubes. It also explains one of the most unexpected things about this phono stage (or phonostage): it is the quietest one I've heard, ever. With the preamp volume set to listening volume (and I like to listen loud), I put my ear to the 105dB-sensitive Klipsch La Scalas (footnote 3) and heard only the faintest rush, like a breeze on a summer night blowing through the almond trees in a distant valley.

My initial listening impressions of the PrimaLuna were hardly positive. It sounded listless, grayish, and shut down and emphasized groove noise to a perverse degree. Whatever it was supposed to be doing just wasn't happening. I called Deal, who told me that the review unit was fully broken in. But he also told me that it needed to be left on for three days straight to shake whatever malaise or evil eye it might have picked up during shipping—a procedure he recommends with all tubed gear. I've owned tube gear for nearly 30 years and have never heard of such a thing, but Deal has been selling tubes and hi-fi for even longer, so I decided to take a drink from his cup of mystery brew.

To cut to the chase, Deal is on to something. I left the PrimaLuna on for about 100 hours, then sat down to encounter a completely different product. Something inside it had woken up—and I mean all the way up. The music in front of me pulsed and shimmered on a huge soundstage and had a liquid, luminous character I associate with great tube circuits.

The only factor that detracted from my enjoyment of the sound was a slight but persistent glassiness, so I replaced the inner pair of PrimaLuna-branded (presumably Chinese) 12AX7s with early-1960s RCAs, and the stock 6922s with made-in-Holland Amperex Bugle Boys. While this substitution made the EVO 100 slightly noisier—clearly the stock tubes had been carefully selected—it also got rid of the glassiness and, tonally speaking, thickened the sauce. If you're bridling at using holier-than-thou vintage tubes in this product, I submit that spending $300 to $600 with a reputable tube dealer to improve the sound of a $3700 phono stage is not an utterly insane use of your hard-earned money.

The broken-in, warmed-up, pimped-out EVO 100 proved to be a delight. It paid particular dividends with acoustic instruments and reverberant spaces, so I listened to more Ravi Shankar than might be advisable, reveling in the textures of his sitar and the meditative drone of the tanpura. On Raga Hameer from Ragas Hameer & Gara (Deutsche Grammophon 2531 216), Shankar's sitar resounded seemingly forever, especially in the slower early section, showing off the instrument's plaintive, complex harmonics with particularly keen insight.

The EVO 100's quicksilver character also made me reach for The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City DC263), Joanna Newsom's suite of songs for voice and harp from 2004. One of that record's pleasures is the contrast between Newsom's adenoidal, somewhat creaky singing and the pellucid and altogether grand sounds created by the 46 strings of her Lyon & Healy Style 15 harp. I've never heard that instrument sound as stirring as it did on that record through the PrimaLuna, playing in the air between my speakers like an apparition and roiling my body with goosebumps.

And here's where we get back to design esthetics: No component can be superb at everything, which is why designers have to make choices. In the case of the PrimaLuna, van den Dungen and de Groot worked hard to achieve the ethereal, lit-from-within quality that can only come from an all-tube circuit, and one of the areas that received less of their attention is drive. On the hot slab of classic reggae that is "Confirm Reservation," from Gregory Isaacs's More Gregory (Charisma 6203 103), the PrimaLuna excelled at splaying the vocal against the rear wall of my loft and capturing every last iota of ambient information, but the bass, drums, and rhythm guitar of the Roots Radics sounded tuneful rather than commanding. If your musical predilections run toward mostly rock, reggae, hip hop, or—God love you—EDM, then the EVO 100 may not scratch your deepest musical itch. On the other hand, fans of classical, folk, jazz, and other mostly acoustic music will likely rejoice at everything it does so beguilingly well.

In a way, the PrimaLuna turned out to be the inverse of the Tron: instead of highlighting the physicality and tonal richness of voices and instruments, it drew my attention to the speed, pitch, and realistic decay of notes and their interaction with the spaces in which they were recorded.

If you're a headphone listener, you might compare the Tron to a great dynamic-driver can like the Sony MDR-R10, and the PrimaLuna to a classic electrostatic one like the Stax SR-007.

What matters is that both of these phono stages reveal vacuum tubes to be the future-proof devices they are, capable of fulfilling nearly any sonic and musical brief when placed in the right hands. Both will show you exotic levels of performance—as long as your musical priorities are in line with theirs—and offer high value for your outlay. And both encourage you to understand and more fully inhabit your sensibility. The music and the gear you choose offer clues about the person you're becoming—who do you want to be?

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Footnote 2: PrimaLuna USA/Upscale Distribution, 1712 Corrigan Ct., La Verne, CA 91750. Tel: (909) 310-8540. Email: info@upscaleaudio.com. Web: upscaledistribution.com.

Footnote 3: My B-weighted estimate of the Klipsch's sensitivity was lower, at 101.3dB(B)/2.83V/m, but this is still the second-highest sensitivity of all the speakers I have measured.—John Atkinson