When we swapped digital sources to analog, we first gave Avishai Cohen's From Darkness a spin. Tidal offer this in 24/48kHz and 16/44.1kHz digital file versions. When playing from vinyl, the 24-bit version comes closest. In the second track, the grand piano features strongly with a repetitive minimalist riff that's laced with forceful rim shots on the snare drum in an overall Latin setting. Jake Shimabukuro, the Hawaiian ukulele master, was next with his Nashville Sessions to cover a wide range of musical styles from intimate soft to outspoken heavy. Again the Latvian amp quickly switched gears to follow the input signal with ease and drive the zero-crossover speakers with full control. Highly sensitive loudspeakers with an additionally high input impedance might have been too easy a load so we decided to make the amp work harder. Enter the Sounddeco Alpha F3 with 92dB sensitivity at 4Ω nominal. Of course these are from a completely different sector of the speaker spectrum but representative of a vast swath of available designs, here a 4-driver ported 3-way with very decent parts and budget-friendly price. In the days we played with these loudspeakers connected, we found no real downside to the combination. Of course the Pnoe were more in our face and due to their design, much faster. It was not the PP10's fault that we longed for horns again. The Polish Alpha F3 simply are more senang as they say in Indonesia with a higher-powered solid state or class-D amp. With such an amp, the Alpha F3 shines.


Time to let the PP10 have another shot at even more sensitive horns. After a round of musical chairs, the Pnoe ended up with a Devialet D-Premier for video duties; the Sounddeco moved into a Layered Sound setup with Podium Sound 1 panels and Audio Note Meishu integrated; and the Avantgarde Duo Omega hooked up to the PP10.


109dB out for 2.83 volts in is a lot. So we started again with our ears close to the horn mouth, volume knob at nearly high noon. Once again there was silence, pure nothing. Now we repeated our musical tour with the records mentioned earlier. With their active bass, x-over-less mids and gently filtered tweeter, the Avantgarde horns are in a class all their own. With the DIMD PP10, they were a match made in heaven and on par with our favorite tube/horn combination involving our Audio Note Meishu. The word 'our' is emphasized because over the years, we have tweaked our 300B-based 6wpc monster amp to very personal standards so it is not as warm and tubey as the stock British Audio Note. Our Meishu is lively, vivid and highly dynamic. A major flavouring component is the 6SN7 we use in the first stage.


Instantly the DIMD PP10 delivered 98% of our personal flavour. Where the PP10/Pnoe pairing had already delivered great sound and musical pleasure, the combination with the Duo Omega trumped it all. For micro detail, the German horns are only met but still not surpassed by electrostatic loudspeakers. What ESL can't do is provide the same wide sweet 'spot' of the Avantgarde horns. With whatever source—disc, disk, internet streams or vinyl—if the content contained sufficient detail, the Latvian amplifier brought it all out to the fore. In audiophile terms, the PP10 had bandwidth, linearity, liveliness and speed. From what we observed across our weeks with it, any and all negative bias towards EL84, push-pull mode and global negative feedback became categorically pure horse manure. Period. Really!


And it wasn't just that the amp sounded great. It looked fantastic too, with very nice lines, a clever combination of wood and aluminium and all the bulky trannies nicely tucked away below deck. So what exactly was hidden there? All screws but one were clearly visible. The last to remove hid underneath the warranty sticker. Too bad, the warranty was now void. Once all screws were removed, we flipped the amp over and took off the wooden cover consisting of several pieces of blond Oak bonded together, then CNC'd into the final shape. What at first glance had seemed to be a sheet of anodized aluminium for the top part now proved to be an assemblage of three massive 5mm thick pieces to which all electronic parts connect. At one end was a fairly sized toroidal line transformer, at the other two output transformers. The input selector knob attached to the Alps selector turned a long suspended axle. Another Alps part served volume. All point-to-point soldered parts lined up like a military operation. Where needed, they were supported by more massive wires doing both electrical and mechanical duties. For us this was the neatest three-dimensional P2P work we'd ever seen.  


In closing, Edgars Spārniņš set his goal high - very high. Of course the best motivator was the love for his wife Marta. He not only set his goal but met it because Marta was happy with the sound. That is the best possible compliment he could get. Spouses know each other. For us, Edgars created a 10wpc EL84 push-pull integrated amp with 6dB of global negative feedback that handled all our loudspeakers from good to brilliantly. The small amount of NFB helps lower the output impedance to raise damping factor and thus driver control. Loudspeakers without crossovers favour that and we own a few of them. We used the word 'clever' three times. Once was for the way cooling is implemented, once for the tube cages, once for how well wood and aluminium combine. By the way, the latter contributes, we think, to the low noise floor of the amp. Paraphrasing the old Egyptians who coined the expression As Above So Below by Hermes Trismegistus aka Toth, DIMD rendered it As Outside So Inside. How so? Clear lines of exterior design and exquisite materials reflect the insides and vice versa. In conclusion, we can only say that DIMD from Latvia have set a new benchmark for small top-quality tube amplifiers...

DIMD website