Paul, I heard the top-of-the-line Confidence floorstanders (C4?) and while I was impressed by the staging, I was not impressed by the tweeter with my music. At the time I was doing the testing, about seven years ago, I was listening almost exclusively to electroacoustic and electroacoustic improvised music. Only a few speakers that I heard did well with this kind of music, JM Lab Electra and Utopia Be being the best among them. B&Ws were also good. The Dynaudios, which were great on most kinds of music, could not accurately reproduce the sound on this kind of music. That's why there's much to factor in when evaluating music components. People talk about the room justifiably but equally important is one's musical taste as well as taste in the kind of reproduction provided by the system. For EA and EAI, I need something fast, authoritative, detailed and powerful. This music puts enormous demands on the speakers. At one point four years ago, I had to replace the tweeters on my Altos because of this. One of the dealers in an audio shop commented that my music was very good for evaluating the capability of a component.
I never meant to suggest that the MF A308 was better than your A5. Only that my original experience with the Micros were with that amp.
I'm curious about what you consider to be the sonic signature of the Gryphon amplification. I'm currently considering the purchase of a Gryphon Encore, which is a very powerful A/B amplifier and going for a reasonable price used. I'd be also interested in what might be a compatible preamp if I were to go in that direction. I'm still considering the ASR, but part of me thinks it might be better to go with separates this time rather than the multiple boxes that come along with the Emitter. With separates, if one component goes bad, it can be replaced readily enough. With the Emitter it involves sending multiple packages in for repair. Can you describe the sound of the Gryphon with the Utopia speakers? Which Gryphon were you listening to?
Jadis would probably be great for most kinds of music except for rock and EA. I imagine it would be majestic on vocals and small group jazz as well as chamber music. But would the low wattage and tubes work well with Focal floorstanders given their difficult impedance load? Someone said on the Audiogon once that the Jadis 845 on Nova Utopias was the best sound he had ever heard. I imagine it was but I can also imagine what he was probably listening to. I would suspect that this amp would have otherwise been pretty bass-shy.
