Hi Everyone,
So not sure how this has happened really but I think I’ve turned into an Audiophile, shocking I know, as on Saturday had had my first taste of Tube Rolling with our Trafomatic Rhapsody 300B Single Ended Valve amp and the difference was quite staggering.
When we got our DeVORE O/Bronze speakers recently I partnered them with our demo Rhapsody amp which really is brilliant as it has great bass depth and control which the Bronze’s really respond to but it did lack the warmth and naturalness of the Western Electric 300B valves that we are so used to with our Western Electric 91E 300B valve amp that we generally partner with our DeVore O/96’s speakers.
So this got me thinking, if we changed the stock 300B valves that come in the Rhapsody and replaced them with the Western Electric version, which are generally considered to be the best 300B valves out there, would that give us the best of both worlds, so the depth and bass control of the Rhapsody and bring back that stunning mid range we get on the 91E, the only issue is the Rhapsody has 4 x 300B’s and the Western Electric only 2 and at £1499 for a matched pair I wasn’t too keen to buy 4 on a hunch, luckily I ended up with 2 WE91E amps here so we could now experiment with no cost implications, happy days.
Well it is not normally the case when an idea exceeds your expectations but on this occasion we really hit nirvana, the difference by putting the Western Electric 300B’s in the Rhapsody was something else, not only did we retain the bass depth and control but the mid range really came alive with a real refinement at the top end also, going back to the stock Rhapsody felt like it was missing half the mid range information, it was very upper mid focused, still very good but once you know what you are missing you just can’t go back, as I have said many times, in HiFi ignorance really is bliss. We then went back to the WE 91E amp with it’s own valves in which sounded great but it did lack the authority of the Rhapsody.
As was mentioned by one of the customers here at the time, running the Rhapsody with WE 300B’s with the DeVore O/Bronzes really does give you a nice taste of our Reference room where we are running the 4 Box DeVore O/References partnered with nearly £200K’s worth of Trafomatic Pre/Mono setup, so knocking on £350k’s worth but this setup is £50k so a really nice place to be, it is basically a mini 2 speaker version of our Reference room.
Next I need to try swapping the smaller Preamp valves out on the Rhapsody as I have been told these can make an even bigger difference so hopefully do that in a few days as I will be ordering a pair CV181 tubes by Psvane asap as recommended to try.
All very enlightening I have to say and I guess this is one of the perks of Valve amps, you can change the sound significantly by just swapping out the valves, in this instance it would be a £3000 upgrade after already spending £20k on the amp but I would say it is 100% worth it, going forward I will only be running the Western Electric Valves in our Rhapsody.
So I thought our O/Bronzes sounded incredible before this weekend but now they really do sound perfect so if you’d like to come in for a listen to this system please feel free, mad to think that after 45+ years of mucking around with HiFi there are still things to learn and pleasant surprises to be discovered.
All the best,
Regards,
Paul.
