The RevelationWe are just over 1500 hrs on Sarah and 340 hrs on the new pair of WE tubes.
This past week has been a revelation of how next level the WE 300B actually is. They just opened up significantly (and I mean significantly) at 250-300 hrs. My original pair never sounded this good at 450-500 hrs, which is also when the noise started. Fingers crossed, this new pair doesn’t suffer from the same fate.
Night after night this past week, I’ve had many holy shit! moments. I found myself loving everything I heard, without feeling unsatisfied and skipping tracks. I should have taken a lot more screenshots, but the following tracks are the only ones where I had enough wherewithal to actually take one.
While everything is sounding much better, if I had to focus on one aspect that has had the most profound change, that would be the lower octaves—much fuller and delightfully denser.
And while Bass was cheering from the window for the first 250 hrs.
Now it has come out to play (no pun intended).
And holy shit—it has such palpability, slam, gravitas, control and texture, that I’ve been just left dumbfounded. More on that at the end but let me also give some credit to other aspects that have also flourished in the meantime.
The midrange is increasingly more magical with soul penetrating vocals and the soundstage is so expansive and holographic that I’m left wondering if there are any friggin walls in the room. While notes always carried a few feet behind the sweet spot—they are now accomplishing the same feat with such clarity and precision that I’ve been staring at my atmos speakers in the ceiling with growing suspicion.
I had my son come down tonight and played a few tracks without going in to any details and then I asked what he thought and he immediately pointed out that the bass was much much better. That evoked two immediate emotions/thoughts:
A) Proud of my Audiophile in the making for picking out the same thing I noticed
B) Glad that I was not being biased about my own rig
Then I played a few tracks from Dominique Fils-Aimé. He had already heard ‘Birds’, so I picked that one last and opted for another favorite of mine ‘Where there is smoke’. I accidentally hit another playlist before the track ended and he was a bit disappointed—he was so in to it! Then we played ‘Home’ and ended with ‘Birds’—-the last one hitting me more profoundly than ever before. The bass, the vocals, the holographic flapping of the wings…Damn.
Then I shut the system down and showed him the HPC Sluggo I got from Mark for the streamer that I intend to introduce in the rig next week. He was shocked to see how tiny it was—lol. After we went upstairs, he was humming ‘Where there is smoke’ and I was like, ‘Are you a Dominique fan now?” And he was like: ‘Yeah that was low-key cool.’
Mental Note: Find out how and when to use the slang ‘low-key’ so I can sound cool to my teenagers.