300B

Recently I was fortunate enough to have a weekend with a nice Airtight ATM-300 power amp. Art Dudley reviewed the newer version of it in his Listening column a while back. It allowed me to use my WE 300B tubes to hear what they are like.

It ended up being a very lush big sound. I felt it was a bit rolled off at the frequency extremes, but certainly nothing to detract from excellent sound. Fortunately for me I still preferred the extension, grip and control of my Siemens F2a based Cortese. The Shindo amp was a lot quieter too. Much more inky backgrounds. The 300Bs provided a fantastically lush midrange, which was very beguiling, hypnotic even, especially with the vaguely purply blue glow of the WEs. Having said that, I’ve always thought the F2a tubes are like 300Bs on steroids and I think this still holds true. The amp worked very well with my very efficient 16Ω 100dB Shindo speakers as expected.

Build quality of the Airtight amp was of an extremely high quality as would be expected of a manufacturer of this ilk. It was also very heavy!

It was good to be able to spend a weekend with a top notch amp from a different manufacturer to enable me to appreciate what I have already. The Airtight is definitely a great amp and whoever ends up with it will be very satisfied I am sure. I nearly considered buying a Cortese 300B amp as well, to complement the F2a, but have decided against that. Would be too similar. I do have plans to buy a Montille CV391 amp in the near future though. This will allow me to have a single ended amp, and a push pull amp, just for different flavours. Got to sell some stuff though first!

Picture below stolen from Herr Fern, a fellow Shindo-phile, who also happens to create some superb wood work products, like plinths for Garrards and whatnot.