How to fly higher than top mast? Use a longer pole. Just as bragging isn't when true, so gilding the lily isn't when effective. Because I could, I swapped out the XA30.8 and moved in the Crayon CF-1.2. It's our more suave Job 225. With the Pass on the warmer meatier darker end of the spectrum, I was curious. Would a further speed and light injection from a mega-bandwidth DC-coupled amp atop the silver cables embed easily in Lio's exploded fluidic spaciousness? Or would it rob Paul to pay Peter? No thievery took place, corporate or otherwise. The Crayon's peculiar mastery over this speaker's specific bass loading was in full effect. The top end had opened up even farther. It annihilated any triode-related bandwidth beliefs. Whilst the centre of gravity hadn't upshifted relative to tonal balance, I was John Carter of Mars where gravity is slightly lower than here. Instead of the Pass' weighty downward force, I had more upward lift. Finally the DHT flavour of fluffy spaciousness and living breathing 'single-driver' depth remained intact. Its inherent smoothness even meant that I could play unreasonably loud without seeing any thorns. Yet fiery string plucks weren't really lacking in metallic zing. Quite the tightrope trick.


To my ears and way of thinking, this was a truly golden match. Instructive about it was the 'counter force' the Lio DHT preamp could withstand without collapsing its own virtues. This was another demonstration of its potency. Truth told, I'd never thought much of the 2A3, perhaps because my first encounter with it was by way of Cary Audio monos. Those were very traditional 'deep triode' designs which didn't do it for me. By way of rite of passage, I'd owned various 300B amps and then always favoured the modern bottles à la EML and KR over the Western Electric and Psvane vintage versions. My favourite 'standard' DHT had been the 45 and PX-25, the former in Yamamoto's amp, the latter in Art Audio's. Of course their SET power ratings were pretty useless, hence short-lived infatuations. But rolled I had to suffer a low opinion of most current Russian and Chinese glass. Though Vinnie's gold-grid electro-harmonix Russians were of the heavy robust glass type, they still piqued past judgments. Suffice to say that in this circuit, I now had no real urge* to roll. To reiterate, Vinnie's DHT DAC/preamp drove a MHz DC-coupled amp and ceramic drivers via pure silver cables. Despite these enemies of the tube state, the sound had arrived at perfected triode inside tangible fluidity and enormous spatiality. Translated, to me this sounded as good or better than many very expensive valve amps married to rare copasetic speakers. Yet it used arch-conventional boxes of lower efficiency, class A/B transistors to drive them and current-production plebeian Soviet bottles. Then it flipped common wisdom backwards. It put the DHT into the linestage, not the usual speaker-drive end. The effrontery and smarts of it all!
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* "I chose the EH2A3 Gold Grid as the stock tube for the following four reasons:
• Sonically it sits right in the middle and makes for a great starting point and possible final destination tube - detailed but not overly so; rich tone but not too thick, dense, overly saturated; tight fast bass response but not a tube bass heads will fall in love with.
• New production tube, easy to obtain in quantity and at <$100/ea. does not break the bank.
• Very low noise and hum in our circuit, better in this regard than most other DHT I tried, including quite a few different new production 2A3 and 300B
• Very linear response and high bandwidth in this circuit: 10Hz - 250kHz (+/- 0.5dB) and the -3dB point was close to 500kHz!"


Which wasn't yet all of it. It's no exaggeration to write that compared to Nagra, Vinnie Rossi the brand is a flyweight. Swat. It's an upstart barely out of preschool. In my exotic tube Olympics however, his Lio DHT Pre took the gold, my beloved Nagra Jazz the bronze. The silver remained out of reach for the Swiss given the size of Lio's lead in these DHT games. 12A...7 triodes of the small-signal persuasion just won't produce this aroma regardless of design pedigree. Vinnie called it. Quite the sobering realization. Given that the Lio platform had previously nabbed one of our exceedingly rare Lunar Eclipse Awards, it had already maxed out our special recognition scheme as well. Time to pause and let it all sink in.


Sinking. Still sinking as some final bubbles rise to the surface. As reviewed, the Lio DAC/headfi/pre 3-in-one DHT is a game but more importantly gestalt changer. It has definite character or effect. It's of the sort SET aficionados so often chase yet more often than not only meet at weaker dosages whilst still having to put up with very real limitations on raw speaker drive, woofer control, bandwidth on both ends, overall noise and distortion density. Partnered to a solid-state amp which overcomes that entire list of tube weaknesses, the Lio DHT applies the classic tube hybrid concept to power triodes not small-signal variants. HF reach takes the stock tubes to 500kHz but creates zero noise even over sensitive 'phones. That aces typical challenges inherent in that concept which successfully injects the desired direct-heated triode flavour undiluted by many metres of phase-shifting transformer windings and driver tubes. Truly wicked!


Shortly before Lio DHT landed, I received a press release for Arcturus Audio's 101D line amplifier. "The preamp section uses left/right milliamperes meters for measuring the compatibility of tubes and the power supply meter measures the voltage. All transformers and parts are of the highest quality and real vintage hardwood that has been painstakingly crafted to complete the look. The line amplifier uses a unique damping and isolation system to help the signal tube perform without microphony. Tubes from that period are known for their noise issues. The line amplifier uses a 10k primary and 600-ohm secondary output transformer. The plate chokes are massive 600 henry units. This provides an extremely quiet signal transfer. The power supply is bulletproof. It uses one 6AX4 half wave rectifier and two 816 half wave mercury vapor rectifier tubes. A VR-150 regulator tube completes the the circuit, The power supply is a slow start device allowing the mercury tubes to slowly dissipate their 'mercury cloud' before switching to operating mode. This results in an efficient and safe start up for the unit." Compared to Vinnie's DHT realization, this one sounded a lot more complex and complicated what with its six tubes, transformers and massive chokes. That's another very attractive wrinkle in the modern Lio recipe. It's far more simple yet offers comprehensive remote control and DAC, headfi, phono and power-amp add-ons. Still more sinking to do. Or should that finally turn into thinking? Turn the page for a final chapter on a tube rolling session with Jac van de Walle's Emission Labs 2A3 mesh plates.