Monday morning, I put on an RTI promo-copy test pressing of Promises, a composition by Sam Shepherd (known as Floating Points), performed by Shepherd on keyboards, Pharoah Sanders on saxophone, and the string section of the London Symphony Orchestra (LP, Luaka Bop LB97LP180). I was impressed by how warm, clear, supple, and flowing this recording sounded. Promises is a finely wrought sound collage: Sanders, Shepherd, and the LSO strings were each recorded in a different city and mixed later by Shepherd. The sound was elegant and pristine, with exquisite fine detailing set against silent backgrounds. I do not remember this recording ever sounding this compelling.
When I played the regular-issue version of Promises, I noticed it was not as clean and silent as the test pressing. My consumer copy showed a faint amount of haze embedded in the sound. I attributed the haze to stamper wear. (This was a popular recording: Luaka Bop sold 14,000 copies in the first three hours after release.) Still, I was much impressed by how the Pharaoh II's phono stage and Goldring's $899 high-output Eroica HX moving coil cartridge made easy work of showing me this subtle difference.
I had to compare those black discs to the streaming version. Via Qobuz (24/44.1), Promises sounded smoother but lower in contrast; the reduction in contrast made instrumental color and sonic textures less distinct, while spatial effects, momentum, and pacing were enhanced. Listening through a Roon Nucleus+ server and the dCS Bartók DAC, my initial sense of the Pharaoh II's line-input transparency was quite positive. It was noticeably better than the Sphinx V3 it replaced in my system.
Auditioning the phono stage
My first step when assessing the phono stage on an integrated amplifier is to install a common moving magnet cartridge I know well and to play a simple, natural-sounding recording I've loved forever. With that as my plan, I installed Ortofon's $695 2M Black cartridge on Music Hall's $1649 Stealth direct-drive turntable and set it to a Lofgren-A alignment.
The first disc I played was John Dowland's The First Book of Ayres (LP, Period Records SPL 727) with Safford Cape conducting The Pro Musica Antiqua. According to Cape, the airs on this disc are performed "in accordance with Dowland's indications and suggestions, in diverse settings, by a vocal ensemble, a broken consort of instruments, solo voices, and the Lute."
The intimate vocals showcased on these 22 short, freestyle madrigals embody my highest ideals for art and musical form. They are simple, humble, direct, danceable, and poetic—the opposite of pretentious or cerebral. The only things these songs require from a hi-fi phono stage is that it be pure of tone, clear as water, and light on its feet. With the 2M Black, the Pharaoh II did all these things extremely well—so well that I forgot about phono preamplifiers and just listened to the music. The Pharaoh phono stage let all the 2M Black's detail and John Dowland's joy come through cleanly, in an energetic and engaging manner.
Another simple recording I've loved forever is Television's debut album, Marquee Moon. I saw them live at CBGB and played their album daily from spring till after Christmas 1977. I had it on LP (Electra 7E-1098) and a homemade cassette I played at work with a Walkman Pro and Koss Porta Pro headphones. These days, I'm playing the title song from a 45rpm, 12" single that was pressed in France. On this Special Limited Edition disc (Electra K 12252), guitars and drums are mixed forward of the bass and vocals. Even more than on the original pressing, the quick, sharp sounds of Richard Lloyd's and Tom Verlaine's guitars dominated my experience, appearing direct, strong, and right-there-in-the-room present. With the Stealth/2M Black feeding the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh powering GoldenEar's difficult-to-drive BRX speakers, the phono stage put forth its clean and clear best while Rogue's NCore amplifier modules jacked up the feeling of power coming from the GoldenEar speakers. The Pharaoh didn't notice the BRX's power-hungry stubbornness.
Forgive me if I am overworking the Pharaoh's phono stage. I can't help myself. And I just hit major paydirt: As I type these words, I am listening to "33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli" (Op.120) from volume 5 of Artur Schnabel's Beethoven Piano Music (EMI 3LP, HLM 7338), and it is sounding super solid, with just the right tone. I am using Grado Labs' $400 low-output Platinum3 moving iron cartridge—see this month's Gramophone Dreams—which is placing the physicality of each keystroke, the nuanced energy and psychic range of Schnabel's pianism, right in front of me. The harmonic completeness of the Platinum3's sound is such that Schnabel's playing upstaged my critical brain and showed me glimpses of Beethoven's creative mind.
This could not have happened with just any phono stage. The Grado, a low-output (1.0mV) moving iron cartridge, requires moving coil–level gain (60dB) and a moving magnet–type load (47k ohms; footnote 1). My tubed Sunvalley and Tavish Design phono stages cannot accommodate those unusual requirements, but the Pharaoh II's phono input could and did. I can't imagine Pharaoh II users wishing for a better phono stage.
The Pharaoh II drives the Maggies
Each time I snug down the speaker-cable banana-plug set screws on the Magnepan .7 panel speakers, I picture the vast, illusionary spaces that are only moments away. I truly love this speaker. Every Rogue amplifier review must include some bathing in the deep-space lucidity of these (slightly) current-hungry, 54" tall, quasi-ribbon dipoles.
I began my Rogue-Maggie listening with the music of young Irish guitarist Sean Shibe. His avant-garde compositions seemed perfectly tailored to the spatial-construction talents of the .7. The mind-grabbing tracks on his Pentatone album Lost & Found (24/48 Pentatone/Qobuz) include compositions by Shiva Feshareki, Julius Eastman, and my most beloved 12th century anchorite and current darling of the avant-garde, Hildegard von Bingen.
On the first Hildegard composition, "O viridissima virga," the sounds from Shibe's guitar hit my room like the Gong of Doom: strong, bell-clear, uber resonant, and sounding ever so much like a pipe organ. The End of Days felt near. With the Maggies driven by the Pharaoh II, the tactility factor—what Art Dudley called "touch"—was more noticeable than it had been on my Falcons or the GoldenEar BRXs. The Rogue-Maggie sound was room-expanding, deep, shimmery, and clear in a way that reminded me of Pass Labs' super-transparent XA25 amplifier. On this track, on these speakers, Rogue's Pharaoh II filled in those class-D voids with something like class-A radiance. Data density felt high. The extraordinary scale of presentation of the Pharaoh II and Magnepan .7 reminded me of the Maggies powered by LKV's Veros PWR+ class-D amplifier, which I reviewed in September 2020. Both amps played the Maggies with class-A tone and texture.
Country blues was born from field hollers floating over solid, syncopated, jig-like dance rhythms, and no blues artist exemplifies this description better than Huddie Ledbetter (aka Lead Belly, 1885(?)–1949). Lead Belly was a musicianer: singer, songwriter, and master of phonetics on the 12-string guitar. His collected recordings describe a full century of African-American experience. Huddie died on December 6, 1949, but before that, on June 15 that same year, he performed live at the University of Texas. My white-label promo copy of this recording, Leadbelly Recorded in Concert, University of Texas, Austin, June 15, 1949 (LP, Playboy Records PB 119), is among my most cherished possessions. Its simple, minimally processed sound never fails to reveal the true character of the system that's playing it. It showed the Pharaoh II's worth by how densely, intensely, and intimately it pushed Huddie through the Magnepan panels.
This phono amp and speaker combination played "Goodnight, Irene" unforgettably, as though they were made for each other. The direct, sincere manner of this combination reminded me of what I experience while listening with planar-magnetic headphones.
Huddie through headphones
I'll spare you my usual HiFiMan Susvara–vs–integrated amp torture stories and simply report on two headphone models the Pharaoh drove extraordinarily well. (Suffice it to say, the Pharaoh's 1.5W headphone output did not satiate the power-hungry Susvara.)
The headphone the Pharaoh liked best was Meze Audio's new $4000 Elite—an open-back, planar-magnetic design. Powered by the Pharaoh, the 32 ohm, 101dB/mW Elite delivered music with relaxed, pristine clarity. The Rogue–Elite pairing played Ledbetter live in Austin with an air of well-structured authority that said, "Who cares if the headphones cost as much as the amp? The sound is dang near perfect."
The headphone the Pharaoh II liked almost as much was Sony's $1799 MDR-Z1R, the closed-back I have used more than any other headphone since I reviewed it in GD16. Because they are so comfortable, durable, natural-sounding, and easy to drive, the 64 ohm, 100dB/mW Z1Rs have never stopped being my paint-splattered daily headset. They employ fast, 70mm magnesium domes that never hint that they're made of metal. Powered by the Pharaoh II, those domes sounded like they were made of paper: not too soft or hard, space and detail displayed with an appealing tube-like sheen. A recommendable match.
A class-A soundalike
When I wrote the intro to this story, I already knew the outro: Rogue Audio's Pharaoh II integrated amplifier delivered enough quiet, clear, clean, effortless class-D power to drive the hard-to-drive (under 4 ohm EPDR) GoldenEar BRX and the current-sucking Magnepan .7 panel speakers. It also excavated some of that extra data I said my DIY friend should ask for: teeny-tiny class-A atmospherics and barely discernible nano-energies to make me forget it was class-D. But it did more: It showed me the best phono stage I've ever found in an integrated amp. No question, I got more than what I asked for.
Footnote 1: I've seen it suggested that some of Grado's moving iron cartridges, which have an internal impedance from 75 ohms up to 660 ohms, like a 10k ohm load, but that setting is rarely available except on phono stages that allow custom loading.—Jim Austin
When I played the regular-issue version of Promises, I noticed it was not as clean and silent as the test pressing. My consumer copy showed a faint amount of haze embedded in the sound. I attributed the haze to stamper wear. (This was a popular recording: Luaka Bop sold 14,000 copies in the first three hours after release.) Still, I was much impressed by how the Pharaoh II's phono stage and Goldring's $899 high-output Eroica HX moving coil cartridge made easy work of showing me this subtle difference.
I had to compare those black discs to the streaming version. Via Qobuz (24/44.1), Promises sounded smoother but lower in contrast; the reduction in contrast made instrumental color and sonic textures less distinct, while spatial effects, momentum, and pacing were enhanced. Listening through a Roon Nucleus+ server and the dCS Bartók DAC, my initial sense of the Pharaoh II's line-input transparency was quite positive. It was noticeably better than the Sphinx V3 it replaced in my system.
My first step when assessing the phono stage on an integrated amplifier is to install a common moving magnet cartridge I know well and to play a simple, natural-sounding recording I've loved forever. With that as my plan, I installed Ortofon's $695 2M Black cartridge on Music Hall's $1649 Stealth direct-drive turntable and set it to a Lofgren-A alignment.
The first disc I played was John Dowland's The First Book of Ayres (LP, Period Records SPL 727) with Safford Cape conducting The Pro Musica Antiqua. According to Cape, the airs on this disc are performed "in accordance with Dowland's indications and suggestions, in diverse settings, by a vocal ensemble, a broken consort of instruments, solo voices, and the Lute."
The intimate vocals showcased on these 22 short, freestyle madrigals embody my highest ideals for art and musical form. They are simple, humble, direct, danceable, and poetic—the opposite of pretentious or cerebral. The only things these songs require from a hi-fi phono stage is that it be pure of tone, clear as water, and light on its feet. With the 2M Black, the Pharaoh II did all these things extremely well—so well that I forgot about phono preamplifiers and just listened to the music. The Pharaoh phono stage let all the 2M Black's detail and John Dowland's joy come through cleanly, in an energetic and engaging manner.
Another simple recording I've loved forever is Television's debut album, Marquee Moon. I saw them live at CBGB and played their album daily from spring till after Christmas 1977. I had it on LP (Electra 7E-1098) and a homemade cassette I played at work with a Walkman Pro and Koss Porta Pro headphones. These days, I'm playing the title song from a 45rpm, 12" single that was pressed in France. On this Special Limited Edition disc (Electra K 12252), guitars and drums are mixed forward of the bass and vocals. Even more than on the original pressing, the quick, sharp sounds of Richard Lloyd's and Tom Verlaine's guitars dominated my experience, appearing direct, strong, and right-there-in-the-room present. With the Stealth/2M Black feeding the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh powering GoldenEar's difficult-to-drive BRX speakers, the phono stage put forth its clean and clear best while Rogue's NCore amplifier modules jacked up the feeling of power coming from the GoldenEar speakers. The Pharaoh didn't notice the BRX's power-hungry stubbornness.
Forgive me if I am overworking the Pharaoh's phono stage. I can't help myself. And I just hit major paydirt: As I type these words, I am listening to "33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli" (Op.120) from volume 5 of Artur Schnabel's Beethoven Piano Music (EMI 3LP, HLM 7338), and it is sounding super solid, with just the right tone. I am using Grado Labs' $400 low-output Platinum3 moving iron cartridge—see this month's Gramophone Dreams—which is placing the physicality of each keystroke, the nuanced energy and psychic range of Schnabel's pianism, right in front of me. The harmonic completeness of the Platinum3's sound is such that Schnabel's playing upstaged my critical brain and showed me glimpses of Beethoven's creative mind.
This could not have happened with just any phono stage. The Grado, a low-output (1.0mV) moving iron cartridge, requires moving coil–level gain (60dB) and a moving magnet–type load (47k ohms; footnote 1). My tubed Sunvalley and Tavish Design phono stages cannot accommodate those unusual requirements, but the Pharaoh II's phono input could and did. I can't imagine Pharaoh II users wishing for a better phono stage.
Each time I snug down the speaker-cable banana-plug set screws on the Magnepan .7 panel speakers, I picture the vast, illusionary spaces that are only moments away. I truly love this speaker. Every Rogue amplifier review must include some bathing in the deep-space lucidity of these (slightly) current-hungry, 54" tall, quasi-ribbon dipoles.
I began my Rogue-Maggie listening with the music of young Irish guitarist Sean Shibe. His avant-garde compositions seemed perfectly tailored to the spatial-construction talents of the .7. The mind-grabbing tracks on his Pentatone album Lost & Found (24/48 Pentatone/Qobuz) include compositions by Shiva Feshareki, Julius Eastman, and my most beloved 12th century anchorite and current darling of the avant-garde, Hildegard von Bingen.
On the first Hildegard composition, "O viridissima virga," the sounds from Shibe's guitar hit my room like the Gong of Doom: strong, bell-clear, uber resonant, and sounding ever so much like a pipe organ. The End of Days felt near. With the Maggies driven by the Pharaoh II, the tactility factor—what Art Dudley called "touch"—was more noticeable than it had been on my Falcons or the GoldenEar BRXs. The Rogue-Maggie sound was room-expanding, deep, shimmery, and clear in a way that reminded me of Pass Labs' super-transparent XA25 amplifier. On this track, on these speakers, Rogue's Pharaoh II filled in those class-D voids with something like class-A radiance. Data density felt high. The extraordinary scale of presentation of the Pharaoh II and Magnepan .7 reminded me of the Maggies powered by LKV's Veros PWR+ class-D amplifier, which I reviewed in September 2020. Both amps played the Maggies with class-A tone and texture.
Country blues was born from field hollers floating over solid, syncopated, jig-like dance rhythms, and no blues artist exemplifies this description better than Huddie Ledbetter (aka Lead Belly, 1885(?)–1949). Lead Belly was a musicianer: singer, songwriter, and master of phonetics on the 12-string guitar. His collected recordings describe a full century of African-American experience. Huddie died on December 6, 1949, but before that, on June 15 that same year, he performed live at the University of Texas. My white-label promo copy of this recording, Leadbelly Recorded in Concert, University of Texas, Austin, June 15, 1949 (LP, Playboy Records PB 119), is among my most cherished possessions. Its simple, minimally processed sound never fails to reveal the true character of the system that's playing it. It showed the Pharaoh II's worth by how densely, intensely, and intimately it pushed Huddie through the Magnepan panels.
This phono amp and speaker combination played "Goodnight, Irene" unforgettably, as though they were made for each other. The direct, sincere manner of this combination reminded me of what I experience while listening with planar-magnetic headphones.
Huddie through headphonesI'll spare you my usual HiFiMan Susvara–vs–integrated amp torture stories and simply report on two headphone models the Pharaoh drove extraordinarily well. (Suffice it to say, the Pharaoh's 1.5W headphone output did not satiate the power-hungry Susvara.)
When I wrote the intro to this story, I already knew the outro: Rogue Audio's Pharaoh II integrated amplifier delivered enough quiet, clear, clean, effortless class-D power to drive the hard-to-drive (under 4 ohm EPDR) GoldenEar BRX and the current-sucking Magnepan .7 panel speakers. It also excavated some of that extra data I said my DIY friend should ask for: teeny-tiny class-A atmospherics and barely discernible nano-energies to make me forget it was class-D. But it did more: It showed me the best phono stage I've ever found in an integrated amp. No question, I got more than what I asked for.
Footnote 1: I've seen it suggested that some of Grado's moving iron cartridges, which have an internal impedance from 75 ohms up to 660 ohms, like a 10k ohm load, but that setting is rarely available except on phono stages that allow custom loading.—Jim Austin
