I spent a lot of time on hunting and finally purchasing what I believed to be the best 300b amplifier. The quest, covered in previous posts, led me to the Nagra 300p power amplifier; or as the company calls it — the Ultimate 300b amplifier. This amplifier, built like a Swiss watch, has an heirloom quality about it and I intended to keep it forever — something I could bequeath to the next generation.
But in three short years, just last month, December 2023, I sold it. What happened?
This is a tale in two parts: First, as always can be attributed to Audiofool-ishness. Second, to Audio realisation. Since the first part dovetails nicely with this substack’s title, and is an embarrassing tale of an audiophile chasing his own tail which needs to fessed up; so let’s go there:
It’s early 2020, I had ordered the Nagra 300p amplifier with some premium Western Electric replica tubes, it was sitting in Lausanne, Switzerland and I was eagerly awaiting its shipment post the final checks.March, 2020, the amp finally left Switzerland, to land in Mumbai. And it does, bang in the middle of the infamous Indian covid lockdown, one of the most stringent imposed anywhere in the world. And for three months, my amplifier is lying in a customs godown somewhere in Mumbai.
The Nagra 300p is shipped in two pieces, the transformer and the amplifier. The packaging — costing me 200 euros — had sculpted foam, two plywood pieces, and double cardboard box: in other words, bulletproof packaging.But the bastards at the Indian customs had other ideas. After inspection, they dumped the amplifier and transformer at the bottom of the box back and piled all the packaging upon it. And in the last 30 km trip of its 9000km journey from Switzerland, the transformer and the amplifier had rubbed against each other and gotten scratched.
Thankfully the damage was cosmetic not sonic, and the amplifier sang — straight out of box, handily beating me existing 300b SET amp (the Coincident Frankensteins mk2). This petite one-box, push-pull amplifier handily kicked a two-chassis mono block SET amp to the curb — again proving that it’s not an amp topology (SET vs PP or Monoblock vs Stereo) that decides the sonic superiority of an amplifier.
But once the high of a new purchase wears off, and only when you live with an amplifier for some time can you truly understand its capabilities, and after some weeks with the Nagra 300p, I realised I was missing something. A depth, a density, a weight to the music was absent. Somehow the foundation of the sound was not there. Plus, the sonic signature emanating from my speakers was too bright for my tastes. It was a deflating experience: I had assembled three of the most well-reviewed, highly reputed components in high-end audio and the sound, well, it sucked (relatively speaking of course)
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Over the next two years, I bought and sold many cables, upgraded my DAC to a Nagra Tube DAC, added a Nagra Jazz preamp — I had a full Nagra system, but still no dice. The system did not fulfil my lofty expectations, and very sadly and very reluctantly, I put it up for sale replacing it with an Accuphase integrated amplifier, which at half the price, sounded better.
I found a buyer for my Nagra amp/preamp. But before I could ship, I found in the Nagra packaging, the brand-new stock 300b tubes that originally came with the amplifier. Just for kicks, I replaced the premium 300b tubes with the stock tubes, and it was a holy shit moment. Suddenly the amp started sounding the way it should have, all this while, all these years!!
1000s of $$ and 100s of hours wasted because I assumed a more expensive 300b tube would sound better than stock 300b tubes, without trying it out!
I was very tempted to rescind my sale agreement, but by then I had come across a Shindo preamplifier, and was now addicted to the Shindo sound. So the Nagra had to go … from the very beginning, it was not meant to be. Plus of course by this time I had an audio realisation, an epiphany, to be elaborated in the part II of this series. But for now, lesson learnt: Assume nothing — the price tag of a product doesn’t decide its sonic capabilities. Also, Nagra stock 300b tubes rock!