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 January 1, 2005
I’d just purchased Brian Wilson’s Smile [CD, Nonesuch 79846] and I just had to hear "rock’s great unreleased classic" in its full sonic glory. It was a Saturday night, I had a glass of a 1996 Bordeaux on the arm of my comfy chair and the CD booklet in my hands, and I’d just gotten to "Roll Plymouth Rock" when I became aware of doors slamming in the back of the apartment, exhaust fans being turned on, and -- it was inevitable, really -- a plaintive wail of "Could you please turn it down?" I could have pointed out that I wasn’t listening at an unreasonable volume, and besides, listening to music is kinda sorta what I do for a living. I would have been justified. On the other hand, I’m a sensitive new-age guy, and my wife puts up with a lot. An extra hour’s sleep isn’t an unreasonable request. Besides, that’s what headphone amplifiers were created for -- especially hand-built gems such as Ray Samuels Audio’s Emmeline II The Stealth ($2495 USD). Oh boy! A reason to unpack a new review component -- and a lead for its review. Sometimes life can be good. Proceed with balance and stealth First, let’s deal with that mouthful of a name. RSA seems to use the name "Emmeline" on most of its products -- there’s an Emmeline RS-1A preamp, an Emmeline XP-7 headphone amp, and so on. How come? I never asked. The "Stealth" part is easy, however. The Stealth doesn’t use internal wiring, because Samuels claims wire tends to color the signals with its impedance and resistance. Ergo, Stealth, as in "no presence." The Stealth is built around a dual-sided, military-grade FR4 printed circuit board that uses two ounces of pure oxygen-free copper in its substrates. Components are soldered to the PCB with mil-spec solder, all residue and contamination are then removed, and the joins are buffed to a "perfect shine." Signal paths are separated from the power traces by solid-copper grounds. The Stealth has four inputs and two outputs, all grouped around its rotary switch, which is located on a special I-O PC board. In addition to doing away with wires, this keeps signal paths short. The Stealth’s capacitors are pure polypropylene MusiCaps from Hovland, which have the reputation of being warm and musical. Halco supplies H2 1W film resistors, which also enjoy extraordinary audiophile cachet. Volume is controlled via a DACT (for Danish Audio ConnecT) stereo attenuator that employs 23 noninductive, low-noise, SMD (surface-mount devices) metal-film resistors and gold-plated contacts and traces. Every component in the Stealth is hand-selected and channel-matched. The Stealth’s tube sockets are ceramic with gold-plated pin clamps. Oh, did I mention that the Stealth is a tube design? As you can see from the photo, it is -- and proudly so, wearing its three tubes on its top plate for all the world to see (well, set down into it, actually, but you get the idea). The Stealth’s tube circuit design has a few surprising aspects. Rather than focus on new old stock (NOS) tubes, which by definition are rare and getting rarer, RSA decided to design the Stealth around readily available guitar-amp driver tubes -- specifically, the very affordable Electro-Harmonix 6SN7 ($19.95/each). RSA’s choice for the amp’s third input tube is where things get really interesting: the Stealth allows you to pick practically any nine-pin tube, such as a 12AU7, 12AT7, or 12AX7, to name but a few. Why would you want to do that? Essentially, you get to choose a tube that offers low, medium, or high gain. Adjustable gain means you can match the Stealth’s output to your source’s signal strength and your amplifier’s input impedance. The other surprise is that the Stealth’s tubes run so cool that you don’t need a cage, even if curious children -- or hi-fi critics -- regularly cruise your sound room. The Stealth is tiny (10.25" wide by 7" deep by 2.25" tall), in no small part because it has an outboard power supply (which is also fairly compact: 10.25" wide by 7" deep by 3.75" tall). The two are connected by a 5.5’ shielded, detachable umbilical. The supply’s transformer is a large toroid. Incoming AC is rectified by a bridge rectifier, then stored in two separate polypropylene capacitors. The rectified DC voltage is then passed to a high-voltage regulator, stored, and filtered once again before being passed on to a high-quality switching power supply that feeds the tube filaments. Both chassis are built of black anodized aluminum, which offers its own set of audio virtues -- such as shielding and RF suppression through grounding the power supply -- as well as simply looking sharp as all get-out. The Stealth doesn’t have a simple power switch -- rather, it boasts a four-stop rotary switch that takes you through Off, On (powering the tube filaments, or heaters), Mute (full power to tubes, but no signal), and Play. The four pairs of RCA inputs, two pairs of RCA outputs, and headphone jack are all solid audio jewelry -- in fact, RSA claims, "There are no upgrades offered or required with this preamp/headphone amplifier, as all parts used are of the highest audiophile quality." Well, for $2495, I would hope so. The greatest pleasure I know is to take something by stealth I used the Emmeline II Stealth in two different contexts. I set up a small listening shrine between two comfy chairs just off the sweet spot for headphone-only listening. Said shrine consisted of a Musical Fidelity X-RAY V3/X-DAC V3 combo feeding the preamp with DiMarzio M-Path interconnects. I used both the Sennheiser HD 600 and 650 headphones. I also tried the Stealth as a full preamp in a system consisting of the Krell DVD Standard, Conrad-Johnson Premier 350 amplifier, Polk XM Reference tuner, Sonus Faber Cremona loudspeakers, and cables and power conditioning by Shunyata Research (Hydra-6, Aries, and Lyra). No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth Observant readers will have noted that the Stealth’s DACT volume control is a series-resistor ladder with 23 steps. It’s a manual control, which means that when you twist the control knob, each step is a full-click stop. If you want a clean-sounding attenuator with no hot spots, this is a superior way to go. It can also be intensely frustrating, because sometimes the level that’s perfect for a particular recording falls between clicks. That’s where the adjustable gain option comes in so handy. I initially installed a 12AX7 as the input tube. The sound was great -- almost ruthlessly accurate, and not at all "tubey" -- but the load represented by the Sennheisers made the detents seem a bit far apart. So I switched to a 12AT7, which had slightly less gain and proved a better mate for the HD 600 and 650. The 12AU7 offered even lower gain -- too low for my taste, although it may well be perfect for headphones that are easier to drive. Once I got the Stealth in the groove for my headphones, I was enthralled by the sound. Smile (remember?) is a sonic masterpiece. Brian Wilson’s tunes are marvelous, and his arrangements are little rock symphonies. Unfortunately, they’re married to Van Dyke Parks’s very strange lyrics, which are more focused on the play in wordplay than on the words themselves. Also, to my ear, at least -- and I seem to be in the minority on this one -- there’s something fatally off in his syllabic emphases. Smile remains a frustrating work for me; it’s musically beautiful, coherent, and personal, and I’d love to cozy up to it -- if only the words weren’t so danged off-putting. More up my alley, sonically, musically -- and, yes, lyrically -- was the new boxed set of the Grateful Dead’s later-period "official" recordings, Beyond Description [CD, Grateful Dead/Rhino R2 76491]. The set remasters the Dead’s output beginning with their first post-Warner Bros. album, Wake of the Flood (1973), and takes it through Built to Last (1989), adding about as much unreleased material as there was on each album to begin with. Talk about an embarrassment of riches. The remastering is excellent, ranging from small but significant improvements to full-scale restorations. Overall, things are cleaner and crisper, but one of the most consistent revelations is Phil Lesh’s gates-of-hell bass sound. In concert, as the set’s text booklet points out, you could watch the crowd shudder and ripple in response to Lesh’s rolling thunder, and that’s an aspect of the Dead’s sound that never quite translated into the official canon of recordings. Until now -- and that’s something the Stealth did a spectacular job of revealing. Big bass -- and, where available, big, big bass. Wowsers. Not to slight the rest of the musical spectrum in any way. I keep returning to Reckoning, the live set that shows off the band’s folkie origins. Jerry Garcia’s ringing acoustic lines have a drive and concision that will startle nonfans who think of the group as self-indulgent. If you can’t spring for the full set, wait until Reckoning is released as a two-disc singleton, then grab it to show off your hi-fi. The bonus is that cranky critics, such as my good friend Robert Baird, will never believe it’s the Dead. And then there was Cantus’s Comfort and Joy: Volume One [Cantus CTS-1204]. The group’s vocal blend and timbre were so perfect I kept forgetting to breathe -- and the decay of the room sound was so perfectly prolonged that I would have sworn I could hear the dust bunnies in the corners of Goshen College’s Music Center, if only I hadn’t been there myself and seen how immaculate the facility was. Even so . . . $2495 for a headphone amp? That stealthy thing that enters the house a guest and then becomes a host, and then a master $2495 is steep. I’m not saying the Stealth isn’t worth it. Hand-built and drop-dead gorgeous, it’s obvious that its components are dear and that it’s a real bear to build. I’m sure it isn’t overpriced, but it surely is at the top end of headphone-amp pricing. On the other hand, by high-end preamp standards -- especially high-end tube preamp standards -- it’s almost a bargain. So into the main system it went. Once again, the switchable gain feature proved its worth, because the C-J Premier 350/SF Cremona combo didn’t need gobs of gain -- this is where the 12AU7 tube came into its own. The same qualities of natural timbre and speed I’d noted in the Stealth’s performance as a headphone amp were present in its preamp operation as well. In addition, it delivered the three-dimensional soundstaging that makes tube aficionados seek hot glass in the first place. Ladies and gennelmun, Cantus had entered the building. There they were, standing in a deep crescent that ranged from one Sonus Faber Cremona to the other, and bowing back all the way to the front wall. In a hall. A big hall. A big, reverberant hall. Did I say wowsers? In spades. There are a few caveats. The first is that the Stealth doesn’t offer remote volume control, which is not much of an issue for a headphone amp but can be a pain in the keister in a system preamp. Given the way the Stealth is designed, adding remote control would not be a simple matter, so don’t buy it if remote control is a deal-breaker. And as much as I liked the Stealth, it wasn’t perfect. My long-term reference preamp, the Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista, doesn’t have quite the Stealth’s sweetness, but its bottom end on the Grateful Dead’s set did an even better job of capturing Phil Lesh’s mammoth bass lines. On the Cantus recording, the singers create an even deeper semicircle through the Nu-Vista -- one that ignores the front wall’s reality-based plane of existence.
The Stealth, however, placed tenor Brian Arreola more palpably in the room on Comfort and Joy’s "Suo Gan." The ability to deliver the human voice convincingly is no small attribute in an audio product. In fact, it could be argued that it’s one of the hardest tests of them all. The Stealth passed it handily. Do good by stealth and blush to find it fame The Ray Samuels Audio Emmeline II The Stealth is not inexpensive. It’s beautifully built from the sort of components that an expensive audio component ought to boast -- hand-built, of course, and you pay a premium for the craftsmanship. If you don’t value that degree of luxury, you’ll never convince yourself that the Stealth offers good value, no matter how much you appreciate its performance. I, however, am a sucker for that sort of thing in a hi-fi component, though I don’t get it in watches or cars -- I do understand that perception is everything. I dig what the Stealth does, and I cherish it at least as much for its quirky human interface (changing tubes to set gain -- how charming). Maybe you won’t. But if you value headphone performance and enjoy high-resolution hi-fi, the sort that tube products still deliver, you should experience the RSA Stealth. Think of it as flying under the radar of corporate high fidelity. …Wes Phillips Ray Samuels Audio Emmeline II The Stealth Preamp /
Headphone Amp Ray Samuels Audio E-mail: rsamuels@raysamuelsaudio.com
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Ray Samuels Audio
Emmeline II The Stealth Preamp / Headphone Amplifier
