Reprinted with permission from

Volume 19, Issue 100

 
Recommended Systems

Frank Doris

Valve Amplification Company
Renaissance Seventy/Seventy and
Renaissance One-Forty Amplifiers

Most of the time when I hear a new component, my reaction ranges from underwhelming indifference to a semienthusiastic, "Yeah, that's nice."  Rare is the day I hear something and say, "Wow, that's great!"  Even rarer (once every few years) are
he times a component makes me bodily extrude the proverbial rectangular blocks molded from clay used as building material.  That was my reaction the first time I heard the Renaissance Seventy/Seventy stereo push-pull triode amplifier at the HP Ranch.  Simply the most articulate, lifelike, detailed, dimensional, spacious, uncolored, textureless, Lord-almighty lifelike amplifier I have ever heard.  I heard vocalists and instrumentalists with a greater proportion of sonic and ambient cues telling me "this is real" as opposed to "this is fake" than in any amplification device I'd ever experienced.  A quantum, and I mean quantum, jump toward the sound of unamplified reality, absolutely shocking in its fidelity.  Only thing was, the roughly 70 watts per side the Seventy/Seventy was putting out wasn't enough to drive the main panels of the Genesis
ne loudspeakers to loud volume without clipping.  One month later, enter the Renaissance One-Forty push-pull triode monoblocks.  Ho ho, a much better match!  And, if anything, an exception to the rule that a manufacture's lower-powered
mplifiers are better than their higher-powered ones.  These amplifiers are, like their lower-powered sibling, frightfully good - only better.  Certainly the best I've heard by an astronomical unit, and the first electro-gadgets I've seriously lusted after (knowing the lust will never be consummated at $22,000 a pop) in a decade.

These amplifiers do so many things so well that it's almost pointless to go on about the detail resolution, the absolutely proper soundstanding, the microdynamic nuances, the near-perfect tonal balance, the utterly scary sense of image dimensionality and definition, the sense that you've been transported into the original recording space... I can't figure out if these amplifiers are doing much, if anything wrong (they must be doing something wrong... right? Haah?) in the short amount of time I've heard them.  (Conversely, five seconds is enough to tell you they've got the Mojo Hand in  em.)  Anything to add, HP?  As in, see Editor's Choice?  See Editor's Ultimate System?  See HP and FD, from sheer sonic stupefaction, passed out on the listening room floor?

For more information about The Absolute Sound (R) please visit their website, www.theabsolutesound.com