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I thought that the Audreal acquitted itself exceptionally well on guitar-laden fare. I rummaged through a vinyl stack of old Wipers albums led by their later Land of the Lost. I had great satisfaction from how the V30 on "Different Ways" separated out the multi-tracked chicanery of layered fuzz guitars without mellowing out their rocking power. In the upper storey the V30 admittedly stepped on the brakes. Aural cataloguing of the weight ratings for various bronzed cymbals won't be on the menu. How the Audreal sorted out space reminded me more of sand amps again. This meant natural rather than excessive scale with reliable if not centimeter-specific image allocations.
My usual pre/power combo of Funk Lap-2/Myryad MXA-2150 demonstrated stricter sorting and greater depth, albeit at more than twice the cost. One sample thereof was Ivo Pogorelich's DG reading of J.S. Bach's English Suite N°.2 in A minor, BWV 807. Here the piano isn't close-mic'd but captured from 4-5 meters away to include interactions with the obviously good acoustics. From this perspective my reference electronics recreate a very believable illusion of a concert grand that's well surrounded by three-dimensional space. Meanwhile the V30 sacrificed some depth to come across as spatially flatter.


Dynamically it clocked points again. This amp can and loves to play loud. I never worried about running out of juice or serving up coarser grittier fare which failed to cause any slip-ups. Especially bass kept impressing. Here I merely should insert a small qualifier to keep it real. Lightning-quick macrodynamic voltage swings aren't the thing. I cruised through a few more Nada Surf albums which routinely throw one for a loop and heart skip when fat crunch guitars break loose without any warning whatsoever.


Whilst the Audreal handled the blow-back-the-hair effect to perfection, the sheer brutality of the initial dynamic jump kicked in slower than with my kit which delivers the full violence from virtually nothing and at once. With the V30 a visual writer might feel compelled to invoke a mixing console's slider that's quickly moved up, not a button that's pushed for perfect instantaneousness.


All this applies primarily to the low bass. Once we're in the upper bass the V30 gets perfectly quick and sudden. Take Pink Turns Blue's Aerdt album. Over the decades Mic Jogwer and crew have tried their hands at the most varied of musical styles. Here Aerdt is arguably the most electronic and ethereal of their efforts. "Andy" sports a few lonely keyboard layers, Jogwer's typically desperate song and otherwise just clinically mechanical and somewhat hissy synth percussion.


With the V30 the artificial hi-hat tickles felt like miniature needle pricks or depending on season, a falling hail tattoo. This had less to do with bite or crispness—au contraire—and all with quickness and suddenness. What generally serves this amp well is music with low dynamic compression, i.e. with an expanded range of quiet-to-loud values. A personal tip here is Nick Cave & The Bad Seed's Your Funeral My Trial on CD or double 12” LP.