Hello Richard and welcome to TAS! Those Living Voice speakers are interestingly different, bet they're efficient.

Thanks everyone.
Yes, Martin, the LV speakers are very efficient...just as well really as the Sugden is only 25 Watts RMS per channel.
Later on tonight I plan to compare the amp with a Rega Brio-R.
BW
Richard.

Martin, surprisingly not!
I hope it's OK to cut and paste a report I made in another forum:
The story so far:

I have a Linn Mimik2 cd player with a BNC output. I wanted to by-pass the Linn’s DAC and use a Caiman2 DAC instead. AoS members, as usual have been very helpful and have prompted me in the right direction for a suitable lead, which I bought. (I later found I had one in an old cupboard!).

So this is my report:

The waters are somewhat muddied by:
I replaced the wall socket with a MK unswitched one (The 2 neutral wires were loose in the old socket), and I cleaned all the prongs on the mains plugs.
I bought a 2nd hand Rega Brio-R so was keen to see if the SQ was better/different cf my Sugden A21A amp.
I should also add that Stan’s firmware upgrade came this morning so yet another variable into the mix!

Using the Sugden: At first I could detect no difference between the normal CD output (via the Linn DAC) and Stan’s. This says, I believe, a lot for the oldish (1995) design of the Mimik2.
Slowly and gradually I could hear that female vocals were more open and less sibilant. Violin strings too showed a small improvement. I could detect no differences in the bass. Surprisingly, when I used the Rega amp I could detect NO difference at all between the two sources. Make of that what you will… I repeated the experiment this morning (no alcohol) and came to exactly the same conclusions.

I must tell a tale against myself here… I plugged in Stan’s new RiSC chip and sat back and listened…yep…it was all that people had said… better, more affirmative bass, less of a veil etc etc. It was after 20 mins or so that I realised that the sound wasn’t going through the Caiman2 at all but from the Linn to the Rega! What I was hearing was the wishful thinking/others’ reports/placebo effect.

When I did sort myself out , as I said above, I could not discern any differences between the CD output and the BNC to the Caiman2 and then to the Rega.

So, back to the Sugden…
(Would Stan’s upgrade make an impact?)

Yes; Stan’s DAC was slightly more open and transparent; not ‘night-and-day’ by any manner of means, but an improvement.

Using high-def files streamed to the Squeezebox Touch I was able, again, to hear that Stan’s firmware upgrade made a difference - with better definition of instruments and vocals. (BTW I should add here that I’m 67 years old so my HF must be compromised somewhat).

Tonight’s experiments (my wife is away for the weekend), will involve comparing the phono inputs on the two amps. The one in the Sugden (both MM and MC) is not given the plaudits it deserves. (Patrick of Sugdens told me this(!)…and I agree.) However, this is outside the title of this thread so I will stop here.

I expected there to be significant differences in SQ between the two amps. I found this not to be so. Did I read somewhere that the Rega has some sort of quasi Class A output stage?

Thanks for anyone’s interest and help.
BW

Richard

Thanks, Richard. There is no such thing as quasi-class A. It's either proper class A or more likely high or sliding bias class AB.