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Battle of the Swiss Amps: Anyone heard Goldmund Telos Amplifiers?

Posted by DkB (A) on July 11, 2006 at 17:19:04

My amplifier search seems to have turned into the Battle of the Swiss Amps.

I've been hunting for the last 2 years to upgrade to amps that would better convey the advantages of SACD. Some months ago, I posted that the Single-ended Symmetric Pass XA amps had come closer to conveying the flow, colour and life of DSD than any other SS amp I had heard. I thought this could be attributed to some affinity between the musical continuity afforded by Pass single-ended topology and the fluid stream allowed by DSD encoding. (I did audition tube amps like Wavac, Audiopax, AN, Nagra, AR and Cary but could not accept their compromises.) DSD never sounded more human and expressive than throught an XA amp.

A month ago, I compared the Swiss Goldmund Mimesis 18.4 amp with a Pass XA and was struck by the superiority of the Goldmund. The music jumped to life with the Goldmund monoblocks. We then substituted the Telos 400 monoblocks for the Mimesis, and the musicians awakened to an even higher plane of consciousness. This is akin to the advantage of DSD over PCM.

This is expected as the Telos 400 is three times the cost of a Pass XA 100, which is still fabulous value in its price range.

The Goldmund Job circuits are ultra fast, stretching upwards to 3Mhz, so I assume this speed is contributing to the Goldmund amp's live character.

The Goldmund Telos 400 is now my prime candidate for upgrading but I wish to consider other amplifiers. I have heard such good (and lukewarm) comments about another Swiss amp which claims high transistor speed, the Dartzeel NHB108, but have never managed to pin one down for audition as units get sold within days (hours) of arriving at the dealer's showroom.

I will eventually get an audition, but wish seek the opinions of anyone has compared any Goldmund Telos amp (400, 600 or 2500) with the Dartzeel NHB108, and ask or pointers as to what differences or aspects to look out for that would matter in the long term. The cheapest Telos monoblock pair, at $32,000, is almost double the price of one NHB108. However it offers double the power. I will probably use the amp to drive Kharma CRM3.2FE's, but am still entertaining the possibility of Magneplanar 20.1's, in which case the 100w Dartzeel would immediately be disqualified.

The other important factor for me is reliability, as I am hoping this system will stay put for a decade at least. Interesting thing is nobody on this forum brings up Goldmund amps.

I also looked into FM Acoustics, also another high speed Swiss design, but those are stratospherically priced and beyond my budget.

THanks for your advice!

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Kimber Kable

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