In terms of soundstaging, the Kora has a wide presentation, perhaps even wider than the Ayon. The Kora is remarkably pure, direct, and expressive, but it absolutely does not have the mechanical quality, harshness, or metallic edge that plague many transistor designs. Nevertheless, it is audible that amplification is done with tubes, not because it has the expected coloration or rounding but because it does not sound like a stereotypical transistor amplifier. Indeed, the Kora does not sound like a stereotypical tube amplifier. Yes, the Ayon sounds fuller, more relaxed, and more deeply saturated, but I’m on the fence as to whether I prefer that over the open window that the Kora provides.īased on personal preferences, I can imagine a certain listener bias or expectation. You’d expect a pure tube amp to be more liquid but also in that important parameter, I can’t say that the Ayon outperforms the Kora. I’ve always known that the Ayon is not a master of resolution and refinement but in this comparison, this becomes really quite blatantly obvious. However, I will counter that the Ayon can’t touch the Kora in terms of bass performance, speed, expression, resolution, and lightning-fast transients. One could argue that the Ayon instills a friendlier, warmer, perhaps more romantic feel that is easier on the ear and I will not disagree. It does have good bass solidity and slam and it also has a more colorful midrange while it largely avoids rounding or adding too much creaminess or smear. The Ayon Spirit III is a KT-150 push-pull tube amplifier and it has that Ayon-typical full, sonorous, dark, and robust sound. The best way to illustrate this is to go back to the Ayon in my secondary setup after having listened to the Kora. Surely the amp’s unique SquareTube concept is debit to this, but its pure and direct sound is no doubt in part also a consequence of the absence of output transformers which in most cases where they are used are responsible for that typically “phat” tube sound. I tried the Kora in both of my systems and with a wide range of cables and no matter the pairing, the Kora is consistently impressive.Ĭontrary to what one might expect from a hybrid tube amplifier, the TB140 does not sound creamy, fat, overly smooth, or rose-tinted, but rather extremely quick and articulate, super-expressive, and ultra-linear and transparent. And if you experience sudden failure, double-check the setting, whether you accidentally chose the wrong helper.So, how does the Kora amplifier sound? Rather fantastic! Truly, I was not ready to hear this level of performance from a 5000-euro amplifier. Do not mess with that setting, unless you know what you're doing. In this case (and ONLY in this case!) you can try to use one of the other available helper applications. This should help in situations we've seen where a binary would pass the quick test, but then fail in use. The option to pick the helper binary to use is only available if there's more than one binary available for your platform. But you can enable/disable it independently. Replay Gain (Volume Normalization) is optional, defaults to enabled, if you've chosen any of the normalization options in LMS. allow to pick the helper you'd like to use.Until I forget about that routine, again :-). As people keep asking about a changelog, I'm going to start a new thread for every worthy release.
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