"It's a fine art, understanding differences of various transformer core materials and different winding designs/strategies, both on a scientific level and in 'Kung Fu mastery,'" Audio Note engineer Darko Greguras told me by email. We have large stocks of Kraft paper, Nomex, Kapton, Mylar, etc., in multiple thicknesses and widths a transformer will always have several of those materials used within it. "We use whatever materials and techniques get the performance we require, which means some of our equipment is quite traditional and hands-on but other pieces are very modern and high-tech, such as our CNC winding machines. "The output transformer, interstage transformer, and coupling capacitors are all made in-house at our factory in the UK," Audio Note transformer expert Andy Grove wrote in an email. We have about 4000 processes in our document library."Īudio Note's careful selection and control of critical parts is said to play a major role in the hallowed Audio Note sound, including its unerring naturalism. "We make our MC cartridges in house from scratch, as well. "We make or commission all sonically critical parts, from the way our wires are drawn and the materials in our cables, to the manufacturing technology in our nonmagnetic tantalum and niobium resistors." Audio Notebranded electrolytic capacitors are made to the company's specs by Japan's Rubycon Corporation. "We make many of our parts in-house, all signal transformers, signal capacitors, the top-of-the-range Pallas low-capacitance cables for digital, attenuators," Qvortrup told me. All Audio Note products are assembled by the company's 28 full-time employees in the West Sussex Audio Note factory. Made for us, or by us, was a common theme in my conversations with Audio Note folks. The amp's snazzy gold knobs are "made for us in Taiwan to our design, as are the RCA jacks, which are plated with 50 microns of silver. The Meishu Tonmeister's volume controlno remote control hereis designed in-house at Audio Note and manufactured by an outside contractor based in the UK. The Meishu's back panel is made of 3mm acrylic its fascia, 10mm acrylic. Its weight is mostly in its transformer-bearing rear, which makes hauling it up stairs and moving it on and off my equipment rack a challenging and noisy exercise (grunts, groans, and other emanations). Generating just 8Wpc into 4 or 8 ohms, the aluminum-encased Meishu Phono 300B stands a stout 18.1" wide × 20.9" deep, and 8.7" tall. Lighton also brought along an Audio Note S4 SUT so that I could use the Tonmeister, which has a phono stage that's MM-only, with my MC cartridges. The Meishu Phono's new pair of Psvane Standard Hifi Series 300B tubes required 1≢00 hours to hit their stride, advised NYC Audio Note tech Ben Jacoby. I brought it up the stairs to my sixth-floor walkup listening warren with help from Audio Note confrere Robert Lighton. It weighs about 65lb and started shipping in late 2019. The Meishu Phono 300B Tonmeister ($19,300) is a class-A, zero negative feedback, single-ended-triode (SET) integrated amplifier. After a quick consultation with Editor Jim Austin, I said yes. After one recent show, Audio Note owner/CEO Peter Qvortrup asked me if I'd like to review one of their most recently introduced products, the Audio Note Meishu Phono 300B Tonmeister. I've covered Audio Note rooms at several recent hi-fi shows. How times and real estate values have changed. One frigid night, I rescued boxes of ancient radio tubes from an abandoned building on the corner of Mott and Houston in Soho, now a fashionable district with exorbitant rents, barely a 10-minute walk from Fi, Don Garber's fabled shop at 30 Watts Street. I had boxes of them, especially of versions of the 6SN7 triode used in the M2. I spent countless hours researching RCA 5692s, Mullard ECC32s, RCA VT231s, and Sylvania 6SN7s and trying them out in the M2, each new, used, or new-old-stock tube producing stark differences in resolution, tone, soundstage, bass extension, and immediacy. The Audio Note M2 preamplifier was one of the most transparent audio products I'd ever heard, its single 6SN7 tube extremely sensitive to tube rolling. (Senior Contributing Editor Herb Reichert was Michael's partner in that 1990s-era Audio Note venture.) Herb can regale you with tales of motoring across the Soviet Union in an unheated Mercedes, trunk full of Audio Note components and American dollars, but that's a story for another review (most likely to be written by Herb). My first high-end component was an Audio Note M2 preamplifier, which I bought from former Audio Note distributor/current Stereophile contributor Michael Trei.
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