Visit from TonyC

Whilst being a damned fine gentleman, there's something about Tony that brings change to any given system by virtue of his extremely fine diagnostic abilities.  Play him three tracks on your system and he will pinpoint what is good and not so good about it with devastating accuracy.  He has done this before and brought about changes to my system (the Coherent 6D power cables feeding my regenerator and power amp are still giving great service) and so last night proved another lesson in how to zone in on what is holding back performance.

Tony listened to some music and was appreciative of what I had done since his last visit.  We then prepared to make some changes from his several boxes of accessories and magic.  He turned to me and said "let's change the jumpers".  Say, what?  You're going to open with THAT??  So we proceeded to swap out my TQ Ultra Black jumpers for his 4" lengths of unobtainium-rolled-on-the-thighs-of-handmaidens.  I'm still staggered at the outcome and that I could hear much difference at all.  There are 2.5m lengths of TQ UB cable still feeding the speakers and a short jumper of something else feeding the mid/tweeters from the bass terminals.  The midrange came forward, fine detail at extreme stage left and right became more audible and the shape of notes became more three-dimensional.  Don't even ask me how this can happen because I can't understand it, but it's simply amazing.

Then, much more understandably, he suggested that we swap the main runs for his Coherent 6D speaker cables.  These gave a different kind of improvement, making the music more coherent (now I know why they're called that), flowing and bringing out even more fine detail from the mix while further reducing harshness.

So now the system was sounding really detailed, flowing and musical and Tony wanted to make one final change.  He knows how much I have enjoyed my Chord power amp, the longest serving component in my system, and decided that now was the time to spring a surprise on me.  So out came a Belles SA-100 power amp.



I know nothing of Belles the brand or any of their designs.  The SA-100 is of similar size to the Chord and is a class AB stereo power amp with MOSFETs and a very large high current power supply.  In fact the output power of 100W per channel into 8 ohms exactly doubles to 200W per channel into 4 ohms (as are my Ushers), a sign of a very stiff power supply.  Output current is rated at 34A capability.  The power draw is exactly 70W and it runs only a tiny bit warmer than the Chord - tepid at most.

I won't go into huge detail here as I am still listening, absorbing and learning what it can do.  What the Belles brings to my system is huge amounts of extremely fine detail previously buried under the noise floor into sharp focus.  It has the same attack as the Chord and sounds as fast; however, it fills in the midrange and gives a wonderful sense of flow and ease to the presentation.  It may sound crass but there is more music!  Bass is tighter still than the Chord and has a little more texture and shape.  The room gets less loaded than with the Chord, furthering the impression of tightness and control.  Those four 11" woofers in my Ushers need all the control and current capability they can get.  This is one hell of an amplifier and the power and authority of the sound bely the performance figures - and the price, to be honest.

One more interesting observation: my regenerator gives power input and output distortion figures.  The input has always hovered around 2.1% while with the Chord powered the output shows 0.3% distortion.  With the Belles being powered, that output distortion figure drops to 0.1%.  So the switched mode power supply in the Chord is either a horrible reactance load or it's pushing noise back into the mains.

Has my Chord finally been toppled?  It rather sounds like it at the moment.  Doing more listening now.

OMG is the Chord going to be politely shown the door?? I thought I would be getting a bus pass before seeing that happen!

Come on now.  This is surely just a half measure.  There are other models in the range, you know!

Simple solution Martin. Plunder Ruth's "engagement ring fund" and give it all to Tony. Job done! ;-)

Hah Steve, you know very well that such a fund is reserved under threat of cruel and unusual punishment!

Anyway, Tony is a nice bloke but I don't want to marry him

The Belles is still cutting the musical mustard, Tony. I haven't found any genre that it doesn't improve upon as yet.

Interesting!
I briefly had a Belles 150a Hotrod power amp a few years ago. Awful thing - cloudy and muffled. I took it to a bake-off, just to check my findings in another system. Everyone agreed it was terrible. Maybe it was faulty?
Just shows that you shouldn't dismiss a manufacturer based on one example of one product.

Chord out performed - yikes

He's dangerous that Tony .......

I need to gather my notes on the 6D mains cables and do the review I promised

I've been playing some extreme bass tests just to see whether a) the Belles retains control with all kinds of music and b) it has the welly to cope with anything. So out came:

Barcelona from Jewel - Spirit
Answer from Sarah McLachlan - Afterglow
The Man Machine from Kraftwerk - Minimum / Maximum
Durufle's Requiem - Shaw, Atlanta SO, Telarc
Time of Year from Melissa Talon - 21

I've also played lots of midrange detailed music like The Future - Leonard Cohen for that rich voice of his and some more k d lang - Drag.  Perhaps the most telling here is Glass - Violin Concerto No. 1, Eschenbach, Houston SO.  Fantastic handling of all that complex orchestral detail while maintaining focus on the violin, especially in the two big crescendi in the 3rd movement.

Do you know Mike, I'm resisting like hell because the Chord has been such a reliable amplifier in all ways for so long, but yes I've pretty much made up my mind to buy the Belles SA-100. Since the Coherent 6D speaker cables and BD jumpers are symbiotic to the Belles (just as the TQ UBs have worked well with the Chord), I'll be buying them too.