@jsautter
In your opinion, what is the “Berning Sound”? I’ve never heard a Berning amp of any flavor until I heard the LTA Z10 Integrated and I’ve not heard the amp referred to in this thread. I’ve been a tube amp lover though for many, many years. In general, I chose tube amps for the things they did very well like tone, soundstage, warmth and emotion and overlooked those areas where they didn’t necessarily excel like deep bass and leading edge dynamics and image specificity. Some tube amps did better than others but these were general observations. I’ve only heard a few SETs over the years and they really got the tone thing right but I always considered them for the Yo Yo Ma solo listener on a single driver horn kind of experience.
The Z10 nails the good stuff that tubes typically bring to the table without having to do without those other things mentioned above. Its really a conundrum, quite tough to wrap my head around, because anyone who has been around the hobby for a while with opinions formed over years and years of listening to alot of different gear have likely formed the opinion that these combination of traits wasn’t possible. I’ve had alot of different gear through the years, at least 50 amplifiers (I’ve purposely NOT kept count), and I simply can’t describe properly what is going on here but it resembles taking a little bit of where this amp excels and a little bit of where that amp excels and piecing it together to form a whole that you didn’t believe feasible.
Check it out or don’t check it out, it’s no biggie to me or others but this topology must be taken seriously. This is not the flavor of the month BS of which we are all so skeptical. These circuits are complicated, they are difficult to build, they are labor intensive and when I finally got around to opening up the chassis for a peek, my respect for Linear Tube Audio deepened.
Whether it should be called “the Berning sound” or “the Linear Tube Audio sound” make no mistake it sounds like real music. Everyone should like what they want to and I am no fanboy of any gear, but if you know what real instruments sound like be they acoustic or amplified you can’t walk away after listening to the LTA equipment and say that it didn’t sound correct. Sure, you can say they won’t work well for you, your other equipment or your setup but the gap between the best of what solid state amplification has to offer and the best of what tube amplification has to offer just got blown up.
