Thread for ModWright pre- / amps / monos
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Back-breaking heavy. Cleaned up my rack to 2. Doesn’t match my color scheme anymore and not as sexy but sounds good. Impressions later
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Okay. It may not have gorgeous auto-grade paint on it or beautifully-lit tubes, but I must say… Looking at the milled metal is a sight to behold. This crap is heavy and it looks like some masterful metal machining. First impressions improving as well.
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I envy those that can live perfectly fine with mismatched componenens. OCD is such an albatross. 
What speaker cables are you going to try with it?
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Audience Au24SE, represent.
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Are you connecting it to the PS power regenerator or to the wall? I’d be curious to hear your experience if you try it both ways.
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Power regenerator. My electricity is crap. I’ll try it directly into the wall one day though.
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Alrighty, I’m clocking in about 5 hours of listening and burn-in at the moment. I feel comfortable enough to just state a first impression.
Firstly, why did I change amps (effectively “downgrade”)? With my full Cary stack, I would say my system was a specialist setup. It threw a large, full, dense, enveloping sound. It also excelled in timbre. If I just listened to Adele, Sam Smith, Diana Krall and other vocal-centric music, I would be done. It did the whole visualizing the throat/voice-box/saliva thing perfectly. It also destroyed with guitar, especially Rodrigo y Gabriela. Where things got old for me is that at times, it can be too much of a good thing. It had a long decay. Super sweet, euphonic, but slow. The setup is like an anti-Focal if there are any fan boys out there. I wanted something quicker to speed it up and balance it out.
Enter a neutral with a warm-tilt solid-state beast.
This thing did exactly what I wanted. It added speed and because of that, it gave me way more room information. The decays are quicker and gives me a bit more of that room texture. The stage shrunk a tad, but the imaging has improved tremendously. There is a sharper outline to everything and the image is pin-point now. The amp also has a lot more slam, punch, and dynamics. I am much more engaged now than ever. It also helped tighten and speed up my bass. I never run into any issues with flabby or boomy bass. Everything is tight and strong. So far, I am tapping my toes, jamming out, headbanging more than I have before. So far so good.
Aside from the slightly smaller stage, my only other con is that now my setup has a bit too much gain. My preamp has individual gain tuners that help tremendously, but I can see how this would be a mismatch, especially with the high gain of LampizatOr. I could see myself getting the TOTL preamp and amp/mono from ModWright and calling it a day though.
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Update: I slapped my PSVane ACME 300b on my Lampi GG in place of the PX25 and it helped with the gain problem and balance things out at the same time. Things sounding pretty damn good.
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Awesome! Sounds like your setup is finally more balanced sounding! I bet hearing that type of accuracy on a speaker setup must be awesome too lol. Pretty cool to see ur audio journey and specially it taking you where you are!
Yeah I always just connected Diana Krall with u and ur setup lol! But I’m sure other stuff will become even more enioyable now!
I actually don’t own any Diana Krall, lol. I suppose I have a lot of music that is similar sounding though (vocal-centric)
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LOL
Yeah well this is more like what i meant lol.
BTW that mod right really does look super cool. It may be a different look from ur other gear but just like the sound is debatebly a good step towards a different direction I think a esthetically it may represent a new chapter in your audio system too which is very exciting!
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Longer-term impressions:
Pretty damn nice. No need to say too much more than that. I’ve been listening to more music per day. It doesn’t have the same fullness, bloom, and density as the full tube setup. The downside of the full tube setup is that I need to crank it up high to get the full engagement. With this new setup, it has a ton of low-level detail that I can keep it low. It has a ton of room information and accurate position to make it pretty addictive. Hitting a good balance was the key here.
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Congratulations! 
I LOVE my tube amps, i adore them to death and can’t part w/ a single amp BUT, my big $$$ went to solid state ultimately w/ just a bit of tube goodness added in for the flavor. Gorgeous and happy you are enjoying the difference. Let me know if you decide to let go of that Cary pre-amp or any other tubes, because well…hoarder gotta hoard 
.
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I actually thought my hand would be forced when I was running into some gain issues. The preamp and the Lampi DAC both run pretty high. I lucked out that it was rectified by running my ACME 300b on the Lampi instead.
With that being said, Cary does such an amazing job at just giving the listener that full, dense tube sound that people lust for while keeping a lot of refinement at the same time. So, I’m glad I still have the Cary and the Lampi in my chain.
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@M0N when you had demoed the ha300, did you mainly use the taps or the regular hp outs?
HP outs, I was unable to use taps at all when I demoed
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Welp, I thought it was about time to try something different and tbh one of the main motivations was the lack of any impressions other than m0n’s so…
HA300 is currently being built! 
It won’t be till January but I’m looking forward to my first set amp
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Will be very curious on your thoughts when you get it in, looks sweet already lol
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