How not to buy an amplifier
What comes after Accuphase and Nagra? An audio fool hunt ...
It was not supposed to go down like this.
I had researched till my eyeballs popped. Read Art Dudley’s Stereophile review on the amplifier about thirty-five times — trying to understand what he was saying and what he was not saying, reading between the lines, the words, the syllables, the letters. Negotiated. And finally a brand spanking new Shindo Cortese F2A amplifier Limited Edition, a 230V version (a rare beast), made a long-ish journey across the Indian Ocean to my dealer’s house in the east coast (of India — Chennai).
But it was DOA (dead on arrival).
It took a few weeks, but I got a full refund, the amplifier was sent back to Singapore, and now I was back in the saddle of a yet another audio fool hunt. Hifishark, audiogon, usaudiomart, emailing dealers.
And to further complicate matters, just when I had decided to go all-in on a full Shindo system based on my sui genesis experience with the Shindo Vosne-Romanee preamp, I learnt that Shindo has closed shop1. No new amplifiers, cables, preamps, vinyl players available.
To make matters even worse, I had just sold my Nagra 300p power amplifier and my Accuphase E-650 integrated to fund this DOA Shindo amp, and now my system was one amplifier short of making music. Silence reigned in my music room. The evenings felt too depressing, dark, dull and rainy.
Thankfully, an audiophile friend, came to the rescue and let me borrow his vintage Sansui integrated amplifier. I plugged it in — Music! A 48500$ DAC was feeding this 650$ mass-market ancient amp, but the amp more than held its own. Shocked? You bet I was.
There’s something about these music making machines of yore that eludes modern audiophile gear. The words that come to mind are musicality and tone — but that’s another story (post) for another day.
In the coming weeks, my immediate musical needs met, I played the waiting game, and sure enough the used market answered my prayers, and now I had a shortlist of amplifiers to choose from:
1. Shindo D’yquem - 300b parallel SET monoblock amps, 18
2. Shindo Corton Charlemagne Q - El34 Push pull monoblock amps, 80W monsters.
3. Shindo Haut Brion - 6L6 based stereo amplifier, 20W, previously owned by the late and great Art Dudley.
4. Air Tight ATM-300R - 300b stereo amplifier, 9W, brand new.
5. Thoress F2A11 integrated amplifier, 6W, new.
Now, as chronicled in my first post on this substack. My audiophile life in the USA was a breeze: pleasurable, joyous, easy-buy, easy-sell, easy-availability, easy-demo. In India, comparatively, it’s like pulling teeth. You have buy unheard, pay unearthly prices, deal with freight, 50-90% customs duty, damage by inspection of customs official. It’s enough to make an audiophile throw in the towel, buy a pair of Bose Noise-Cancelling headphones and move on to Spotify.
Besides, the used market for expensive ($5000 or above) audio gear is minuscule; so the odds are, if you buy the wrong amplifier, you are stuck with it for life; or you will have to re-sell it for a song to some bottom-feeding, low-balling vulture.
Therefore, the amount of (over)thinking one has to put before any audiophile purchase in India is a hundred-fold more.
Rolf Dobelli, the Swiss novelist and rationalist, in the chapter “The Point of Maximum Deliberation” in his most excellent treatise on cognitive fallacies: The Art of the Good Life, pooh-poohs the whole concept of mulling over a decision. Any decision, he claims, should be mulled over for no more than one week, one week! — even life-changing ones like whom to marry, which house to buy, which car, which vocation, which job.
And I agree. But being an audiophile, means buying the right amplifier is far more crucial and life-changing than anything else — so I took three weeks2.
There is no perfect amplifier, just as there is no perfect job, no perfect partner, no perfect anything. But amplifiers #1, #3, #4 were no-brainers — Art Dudley had anointed them as the best he had ever heard. But #1 — Shindo D’yquem — was a 300b, I had just come from a Nagra 300b, and wanted try a different tube, also it was a mono block, I had no room in my rack for two bulky amps, and finally it was a tad outside my budget.
#3, Shindo Haut Brion, Art’s personal amplifier, was overpriced. I love the late great Mr Dudley, but paying a $2000 premium for owning his personal amp was a bit too fanboy, even for me.
#4, the Air Tight ATM-300R is a world acclaimed amplifier, no just Mr. Dudley but every audiophile reviewer ever (and users) have gushed all over it. But it was no Shindo. And it was going against the grain of my decision made earlier: to build an all-Shindo system. Plus there was a recent price-hike that put it a tad outside my budget, just like #1.
Hours and hours, tens and hundreds, were spent on all audio forums, calling up friends for advice, emailing Shindo dealers. I can claim that I have read everything possibly written on the above five amplifiers any where in the World Wide Web.
Mr. Dobelli was right, I had crossed the point of maximum deliberation weeks ago. And in the end I succumbed to my fascination for the 300b tube — a safe bet — the Shindo D’yquem. I had read-reread Dudley’s review on it fifty-three times, and I could quote his words chapter and verse. Meanwhile I noted another one Dobelli-expounded3 cognitive fallacy in my deliberations: The Confirmation Bias. I had unconsciously decided on the D’yquem weeks ago, and had mostly spent unearthly number of hours confirming my decision.
Seeing that the Shindo D’yquem had been on sale for over three-months, I made an offer to the owner, an offer that was within my budget (still stretching it), but not an insult.
The owner, a gracious and a most polite person, responded positively to my offer, and we came to mutually agreeable price which took two weeks of negotiations and mulling over by both him and me.
So, in short, after what seemed like ages wherein my headspace was occupied completely by one obsessive audio fool hunt, the end was in sight. A legendary end-game amplifier, soon to be shipped to me from Florida, USA.
But, alas, a bolt of lightning from somewhere struck, and the deal fell apart. It was not meant to be.
To be continued ….. Click here for Part Two
Not sure, if this is for good, there is no clarity. A Shindo dealer claims it’s temporary, others say it’s permanent.
🙂
I don’t , of course, claim Dobelli invented this concept, but IMO he has expounded on this topic better than any writer I know.
I enjoyed your recent post on buying a new amp. Although I live in USA where there is no lack of dealers and used hi-end audio gear available, it is still a challenge for those of us who possess limited funds for our hobbies.
I owned an Air Tight ATM-1 for over a dozen years and then decided to explore the SET realm of 300B based amps to better match my 96dB sensitive horn speakers. I finally found a pair of used Thoress 300B monoblocks (also glowingly reviewed by Art Dudley) and was able to buy them. They tick many of the boxes for great sounding and imaging- a serious upgrade from the also wonderful sounding Air Tight now up for sale.