Hi Goners, A moment of your time please. The girlfriend and I are buying our first home, a lovely little condo in downtown Washington, DC. We are going down in size significantly, our current place is 1250 sq. ft, the new place will be 850 sq. ft. Small, cozy even, but an excellent layout makes it extremely livable. It is also extremely hip and modern, stainless steel appliances in an open kitchen, futuristic looking lighting fixtures, etc. Our living/dining room is 20x12 with 9 ft ceilings, but that 20 is one wall, opposite it is the wall the system will reside on and that wall is 10 ft before becoming the open kitchen. The current system is Tube Technology CD player, Rega Planar 3, running into a Camelot Lancelot Pro phono stage, and a Herron VTSP-1a/166 preamp, running into a KR Audio Antares V300 stero tube amp using a pair of 842VHD tubes giving me 12 watts a side and powering a pair of floorstanding Lotus SE MkIII speakers. This is an excellent system that I like quite a bit, but I'm not averse to change. A few thoughts that have crossed my mind, go integrated with something like a Rowland Concentra or a YBA Passion Integre. Or perhaps powered speakers of some sort. Or simply more compact and stylish components, the new TAS reviews the new G-series from Meridian, very chic looking and reportedly great sounding components. Visual appeal for the first time becomes an issue, our current home is much bigger and more traditional, not quite as hip and modern. I want my gear to visually complement the space and not just be something that my partner merely tolerates. She is however the best, she has said that she is fine with me keeping the system completely unchanged which is pretty cool. She's also making quite a bit of sense, saying we should move in, set the system up, and see how we like it. Needless to say I'm a very lucky man, but I really want to try and do something for her. I've been on the tubes/big efficient speakers path for a while, but SS seems to be improving, and there are some great, fairly compact speakers out there. And honestly, I might not mind a little simplicity and a sense of style in my system. So what do you guys think?
Well, it's (Rowland Concentra II) a great SS integrated, with lots more power, to give you more speaker options. It is not etched or too smooth. I would say it leans towards the warm side. Somewhat tubey sounding, but not nearly as fleshed out as a SET tube amp, IMHO. Then again, you won't find that in any integrated except for a Cary 300B SEI(LX20) (as far as I know, there may be more SET integrated options I'm not aware of). The Cary would be an integrated that will give you SET amp sound (20 wpc) and a headphone jack, but no phono. The Rowland would give you 7.5 times more power, which will open up your options for many more speaker choices, and a very nice phono stage as well.
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