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Dredg’s "Scissor Lock" from El Cielo lives somewhere between Alt and Prog Rock. It is immaculate produced and lots of fun over a good system. The intro of lonesome guitar and voice is followed by deliberately subdued but virtuoso percussion in a half-time feel with plenty of pearlescent guitars, lots of space and below it a dynamically agile bass. The Ampollo turned this into a kind of musical bath as though one stared at the endless expanse of the Milky Way in the midst of which hung, ultra precise, a splash cymbal and hi-hat. The bass flooded the room with rebound, extension but no boom or sizzle. Great.

Tonally as well this song offers great bandwidth due to the instrumental arrangement and high production values. The Ampollo seemed dead-on neutral without obvious emphasis on any band. A very minor general tendency had it energetically present rather than silken, midrange-centric or dark and chewy. This reminded me a bit of my Yamaha AS-2000 although here it was wildly superior on resolution and macrodynamic swing.


Classics were next via Swedish Baroque composer Johan Agrell and his Symphony in A-Major with the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra under Aapo Häkkinen, particularly the 4th movement "Presto". Here the score takes off, with rapid attacks that seem about to saw through the strings and the cembalo hammering up a storm. Whenever a system lacks structuring power, this quickly turns chaotic. As you’ll have predicted by now, the Ampollo was fully in its element.
 
If the score was a fine animal pelt, the Ampollo seemingly brushed it up against the grain to achieve the highest pile of acoustic intensity and scale. The best way to say it really was rip roaring but also accurate. With each needle apparent, the forest too was present. Tonal balance confirmed itself as impeccable and even. Enter Mozart’s Requiem in d-minor and its "Kyrie", a massive fugue for choir and orchestra, its structure unusually stern for Wolfgang Amadeus but reminiscent of grande fugue jefe J.S. Bach. The challenge here is keeping the intertwining vocal threads separate which partially run unison with the orchestra. Again Ampollo excelled. Particularly having heard this before at least once or twice, it was playfully easy to follow each choral register which remained distinct not only from the other singers but also the either supporting or contrasting instrumental lines.
 
I also noted how this reading of the Collegium Carusianum with the Kölner Kammerchor under P. Neumann had been softer over my usual reference gear.


Time to test a suspicion and insert my Funk LAP-2 preamp which usually precedes Myryad’s MXA2150.


Fascinating! The mid/treble range now receded by an appreciable nuance which is less personal judgment than simple recognition about what I’m used to and which this challenging music made nicely apparent.


Since I prefer to be led by experience rather than cross off attributes from a fixed sequential list, I’ve not yet mentioned whether Ampollo can rock out. Take "That Summer At Home I Had Become The Invisible Boy" by Scottish post rockers The Twilight Sad. Just as the burbling of song, guitars, toms and melodica begins to get old about 90 seconds in, a few promising hits on a half-opened hi-hat segue into such a brutal wall-of-sound assault of electrified string instruments that the proverbial hackles raise. All hands on deck, controls fully clockwise! Paired with my Neat Momentum-4i, the amp simply went to work without hesitation or complaint.

Like an apothecary it coolly reached into a drawer for a package of 'Rock ‘n Roll 400 Retard' and plunked it down on the counter. Which doesn’t imply lack of bite. Ampollo did hit the gas and shoved gnarly guitars into the listening space but did so completely unfazed, sans distortion, bass boom, bass uncertainty or ear-wilting harmonic screams despite utterly fearless crash cymbal violence.