It took a little longer than expected to arrange the visit – after all, everything had to be just right.
The German Accuphase distributor suggested I get in touch with Life Like, in northeastern Munich, where the dealer had a cost-no-object setup from the Japanese manufacturer set up and ready for demonstration. It was, I was told, an experience you don’t want to miss out on. “Not going to miss out on” I corrected the sentence in my head, picking up the phone without a moment’s hesitation. As it turned out, however, a customer who already had pretty much everything worth owning was so taken with the setup that he had promptly whisked away one of the two power conditioners to try at home.
In the ordinary world of hi-fi, this would hardly have been a problem: eight outlets and a continuous 900 volt-amperes of power delivery are enough for just about any audiophile application. But when we’re talking about the best Accuphase has to offer, 99.8 percent simply won’t cut it. In terms of how they handle expectations, Life Like and Accuphase are clearly a perfectly aligned with each other. So I waited patiently, and we settled on a date when the PS-1250’s power-conditioning duo would once again be complete.
The whole affair seems excessive only at first glance. The stars of the show are the imposing A-300 monoblocks, each capable of delivering 125 watts into eight ohms and a full 1,000 watts into one ohm, courtesy of a push-pull configuration employing ten pairs of MOSFETs per amplifier. In keeping with the finest Accuphase tradition, these power ratings are backed by guaranteed (!) specifications such as a damping factor greater than 1,000 and a signal-to-noise ratio of 130 dB. Under the circumstances, we can dispense with the customary detour into the measurement lab. With every previous contender, however, our trusted measurement engineer has invariably rubbed his hands together in anticipation, eager to see by how much the published specifications would be surpassed this time around. We can safely assume that Yokohama’s flagship components behave in much the same way. This commitment to excellence extends to details that few people ever notice. One charming example is Accuphase’s VU meters, which measure the actual power delivered to the loudspeakers at least an order of magnitude more accurately than is customary in the industry. Does that make the music sound better? Not likely, but it certainly demonstrates just how seriously the Japanese take the term high end.
Naturally, the rest of the system was assembled to the same exacting standard. The monoblocks were fed by the company’s latest and greatest C-3900S preamplifier, its centerpiece being the most elaborate implementation of the Dual Balanced AAVA volume-control system yet, whose basic principles we already know from the C-2300 (reviewed in FIDELITY No. 78). With separate power supplies for the left and right channels and a total of 120,000 microfarads of filter capacitance – remember, this is a line-level preamplifier – the C-3900S is otherwise an exercise in absolute uncompromising design. The musical signals came from the DP-1000 SACD/CD player, while Life Like completed the system with a pair of Wilson Audio Sasha V loudspeakers, long regarded as classic partners for Accuphase electronics.
One cup of coffee later, I find myself on the carefully positioned listening couch, experiencing what amounts to the ultimate refinement of everything I had encountered in previous sessions. It takes fewer than three bars to realize that I’m in the presence of something truly special, though considerably longer to understand exactly why. Chorales spread across the soundstage with astonishing independence from the electronics occupying the room, while birds seem to fly right over my head – even though, by definition, a stereo system can project depth only from the plane of the loudspeakers backward. And yet, for the life of me, I can’t assign a sonic character to this setup.
That makes perfect sense: the impeccable measurements and vanishingly low distortion leave no room for anything resembling deliberate voicing. A DG-68 parametric equalizer is integrated into the system, but it serves solely to correct for the room. What throws me slightly off balance every time I listen to Accuphase, however, has less to do with frequency response. The measurement plots, showing minute harmonic distortion dominated by the third harmonic with just a hint of the second, suggest a relentlessly revealing presentation. Yet my ears consistently detect what I feel must be a slight preponderance of second-order distortion – you know, those good old euphonics associated with small single-ended triode amplifiers. Revealing is certainly an apt description of the presentation. The sheer wealth of information unfolds in the room with absolute ease, always available for the ear to explore, drawing the listener irresistibly into the music. But how Accuphase manages to conjure up such astonishing richness of tone without resorting to any sonic sleight of hand remains a mystery to me, every single time. By the third track at the latest, I stop wondering, send my brain out for a walk, and leave my ears alone with the system and the music.
Life Like
Oberföhringer Straße 107
81925 Munich
Germany
Phone: +49 89 9577113
www.life-like.de
Hours:
Tuesday–Friday, 10:30 a.m.–6:30 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.
German distributor P.I.A.
Accuphase homepage