Integrated Amp Reviews

Next up: Desert Lady/Fantasy (CD, Columbia CK 57856) by Toshiko Akiyoshi and her 16-piece Jazz Orchestra, featuring Lew Tabackin. I played three minutes of the first track, then three of the next, the title track. The soundstage was grand: flush with detail, big pictures, and colorful images, except this time, during some parts, its pacing and images seemed to drift more than usual, none of which I had noticed on the Adderley CD, which is a much more sterile-sounding recording than this more harmonically tufted Akiyoshi one.

I substituted my iFi DSD Diablo DAC, whose character is a little tighter, drier, and more forceful than that of the Cambridge Audio DAC. That did it. It increased force and gravity, sped things up (footnote 4), and, as a side bonus, made the presentation more transparent and detailed. This got me wondering if something in the Octave's own character might have made it and the Cambridge DAC a less-than-ideal match. I'm going to go with maybe, considering the Octave-iFi combination sounded fast, dynamic, and substantial. Pluses and minuses.

The V 70's soundstage sounded airy but also densely populated. It drew a circus tent that englobed my listening space and gave me a fifth-row perspective from the stands that required me to occasionally crane my neck upward to catch the acrobatics vying for my attention: "Hey, look what I can do!"

When I replayed "Desert Lady/Fantasy," a three-movement ride across the desert that opens with a muted, slinking brass line, rolls of ominous conga drums, tight cymbal smacks, and a snaking flute solo complete with throat warble, images were well separated and protuberant, each vividly painted in its own complex color scheme.

At one point, I was startled by the appearance of a tambourine shaking like the tail of an angry rattlesnake 8' behind what sounded like a bass trombone; timbres sounded authentic and tonally delineated. At another point, I was surprised by how many tonal shades of muffledness I could hear mutating from a muted trumpet. I wasn't sure I'd ever before heard this music sound so transiently and microdynamically packed. Even the sustains that reached deep into my room sounded densely pigmented.

Akiyoshi's piano notes gleamed like gems; cymbal hits wavered in undulating waves; double-bass notes bounded like an excited, healthy heartbeat; brass instruments were startlingly dynamic. But the Octave's most striking qualities—its defining ones—were the feeling of transparency, detail retrieval, vivid shapes, and the way it imbued sounds with a stage-like presence. The Octave sounded almost flamboyant—bold, with bold images—but well-balanced, with good extension at both frequency extremes. The lows and highs weren't just good for a tube amp; they were very good, period. The high notes of trumpets and flute seemed to ramp up as high as they should, while lows rumbled, pummeled, and vibrated against my chest. In the middle of those extremes lay a lesson in musical anatomy, one that made me question if I'd been, all this time, using the term "explicit" too liberally, because:

Before the end of the first movement, when a pressing succession of instruments enters the picture and the tempo shifts into high gear, the sound was full, fast, and exhilarating. There was a dramatic sweep to the proceedings, a dynamically charged culmination that kept me on the edge of my seat. The Octave drew the scene and laid it out, with big-screen visuals and movie-soundtrack momentum.

The Octave sounded cinematic, bigger than life but within natural parameters. It played mind tricks, like when I thought its tonal balance might be overly lush or rich but on closer inspection it was merely colorfully dense. Was the V 70 tube warm? More like semisweet, with harmonics more instrument-related than bass-related. How else could the amp sound so transparent and reveal so much detail? It straddled the lines between tube efflorescence and solid state vigor, between low-powered intimacy and high-powered impact, between charisma and authenticity.

After the frenzied finale of the first movement, the ambient silence that opens the second came out unusually thick and bulging. That's when I got it. The ambient silence represents the oppressive desert heat, a creative flourish that the Octave revealed. When things in the track picked up again amid a far-off stream of indigenous war cries, the conga drums that propel the momentum sounded so translucent (yet harmonically threaded together) that it felt as if the real, live thing might be breaking through. Brass instruments were here already, piercing the air and the membrane between their space and mine with a tonal shine and dynamic élan that sounded right here.

The Octave heightened the mind-expanding effects of Can's Future Days (CD, Spoon Records 9385-2 724596938522; footnote 5), as much psychedelically as creatively. The art stood out—the elaborateness of the music's construction, with its multiplicity of sound effects coexisting with a core of more conventional sounds: a slow-beating bass pulse, djembe hand drum slaps, twangy guitar pickings, muffled singing. That girl with the foreign—presumably German—accent? I'd never heard her lyrics so intelligibly rendered, erasing all prior doubts I had about what she was saying. This clear, sensical view on things changed my mind: Those studio effects weren't as improvised as I'd thought; like a well-crafted picture collage that may at first glance seem haphazardly composed, Future Days sounded like a carefully crafted piece whose whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

I cranked the volume to feel the full effect of this ambient, textured, special-effects–laden Krautrock classic lap over me. The Octave produced a panoramic view of deep abstractions and reach-out-and-touch pictures that traveled in elaborate patterns leading into one another. Both color and detail were abundant, swamping my room. Even though I was listening to this track louder than normal, I experienced no listener fatigue, no desire to lower the volume (neither to relieve the sonic pressure nor so that I could feel the handset's cushy buttons again).

Just as I'd never heard Desert Lady/Fantasy sound as cinematic as it did through the V 70, I'd never heard Future Days sound this much like a performance piece or theatrical art installation.

Vinyl Listening
The V 70 arrived fitted with the company's MC phono board—an MM one is also available—to go with the MusiKraft Denon DL-103 cartridge on my Rega P5. The board is installed by the dealer and has no user-adjustable settings. The loading values are fixed for both MC and MM cartridges. In my case, that meant an input impedance of 150 ohms, input sensitivity of 0.5 mV, and the subsonic filter set at –12dB/octave. If you're a habitual cartridge swapper, a better solution might be to purchase Octave's external phono stage, the Phono EQ.2 MM/MC, at a cost $1100 higher than the $850 internal phono option. The EQ.2 features multiple loading options and is switchable between MM and MC.

I started my vinyl listening with Bell Orchestre's House Music (LP, Erased Tapes Records ERATP141LP-CA), a rock-classical hybrid instrumental work that includes several string instruments, group chanting, and a menagerie of seamlessly integrated studio sound effects. Via the Octave's phono stage, the band sounded bigger than six members—more vaulted and sonically varied with a richer, more reverberant consistency. The V 70's characteristic transparency, big-picture boldness, and the detail retrieval I'd heard with digital came through, if not quite to the same level. (That limitation could be a reflection more of the sources I was using than of the phono itself.)

Texture and transient tactility were conspicuous. On the first track, "Opening," violin and double bass produced vibrant, rich-brown tone and vibrational texture that seemed serrated. The drums were focused, dynamically spry, and, judging by the arc of the drum hits, compact. The group chanting was almost Star Trek–y, with its extended-vowel, dashing-through–outer-space aura, vocally layered and luxuriantly toned. The phono stage emphasized the music's coherency, both in the sense of a band playing together in the same room and in their creative complicity, the feeding-off-each-other group dynamic.

I felt a this-is-live tingling at the back of my neck when I put on the first disc of the Doors' double LP, Absolutely Live (LP, Elektra, EKS-9002), even before the music started.

"Even to the crowd noise," I thought. The Octave and its phono stage brought drama and a narrative arc, from the stadium atmosphere brimming with echo and hotspots of restless audience activity through the emcee pleading with people to return to their seats or the show won't go on, to when the Doors are finally called onstage, when the ensuing crowd eruption was an 8' wall of screams that sounded as interlocked and glisteningly distinct as the scales on a snake. The phono stage delivered that mounting excitement in three acts.

When the instruments enter in sequence to play Bo Diddley's hit "Who Do You Love," they're well-focused and jut out colorfully from the background. John Densmore's somersaulting opening drum solo exhibited a good mix of punch and texture. Ray Manzarek's Rhodes piano, played with his left hand, set down a thick, room-buzzing bass groove, while the organ, played with his right, punctured the air with color-stratified chords. Robby Krieger's angular electric guitar chords had a similarly tinted complexion, while Jim Morrison's words were clearly articulated and elliptically formed, with no sibilance. When the band leaped into the track's rock'n'roll chorus, the music had impact, power, and rhythmic fortitude.

About that Super Black Box
Using the V 70 without it resulted in a general reduction in tonal color, soundstage size, instrumental separation, and sense of musical ease. On the other hand, with material with minimal instrumentation, such as just Nina Simone singing and playing her piano or Patricia Barber singing and playing hers, I couldn't be sure I heard any benefit in using the Super Black Box. For everything else, the V 70's fundamental character and qualities mentioned in my review were still there without the Super Black Box, just less so.

Tube Rolling
Finally came the moment to AB-test swap the KT120 and KT88 output tubes, and it's at this juncture that the concept of synergy became a theme for this review, because while I expected my tube comparisons to result in a universal winner, that's not what happened. The KT88's generally denser tone, more cut-out imaging, and more realistic timbre suited some recordings particularly well, while with other recordings I preferred the KT120's more panoramic, harmonically developed, bassier, more dramatic presentation. In the end, I chose the KT120s over the KT88s, in part because they sounded a smidge more refined and less grainy than the KT88. That could be because, though I burned them in for 50 or so hours, it might not have been enough.

The wrap
I found the Octave V 70 to be a slightly tweaky component (in view of its several options) that presented music on a grand scale, with vivid colors and shapes and a dynamic momentum that was emotionally engaging. It did a few things that don't often coexist in a single product as well as they did in this one: color, texture, transparency, tonal density, sense of touch, bass heft, and dynamic power. Does that sound like your typical tube amp?

I would say that Andreas achieved what he set out to do: create an amplifier with the soul of a class-A combined with the muscle of high-powered AB. The result is a product like nothing I've heard before, which sounded bigger than life and natural simultaneously. The Octave V 70 had the spirit of cinema vérité in Technicolor. All things considered, I think the $15,900 asking price for the V 70 with the KT120 tubes and the Super Black Box is a pretty good deal.

I'll leave the final sonic impression of the Octave V 70, in the configuration I just described, to my good friend Karim, in whose ears I trust. Having heard it in my system, he declared, "Rob, your system never sounded this good." That's synergy.

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Footnote 4: That is, it made the music pacier.

Footnote 5: Can vocalist Damo Suzuki passed away on February 9. Future Days was the last Can album Suzuki appeared on. RIP.