Black Widow [Update] - Second round official, 100 amps total, single chassis

Ok ok ok I'll buy it from you, sheesh!

 

BW2? Extreme clarity? Just no...

The ECP T3 was more resolving and had better clarity than my BW2 (had both at the same time). Sold both when I got the T4, which is miles ahead both.

 

I’d so like to see more people here trying and reviewing Meier Audio amps. What I read about the BW here (except Clemmaster’s take) is almost exactly what I’d say about my Corda Jazz ff, but as I don’t have much experience with different amps, I don’t know if it’s anywhere near a Black Widow or not—I only know that, to my ears, it quite spectacularly trumps the similarly priced Jot 2 in just about every sound aspect, so it might be somewhere in BW territory, but who knows?

 

I agree that BW2 is a very special amp. I found it to be very dominant within every system I built around it though. Kind of like Jamaican rum.

 

This is a pretty weird flex, and a pretty blatant example of strawman fallacy that just kills productive internet discussion, and why I'm alot more selective about how and who I engage with online these days. This convo was never about how BW was objectively outclassing other amps, and anybody who's even the tiniest bit savvy already knows the deal. Like why even go there? So you have a more resolving amp, you get a gold star I guess?

I've owned the T3 and yes it's a bit more resolving, but I wouldn't trade the BW for it now. As a community I feel like we put too waaaaay to much energy and attention into these differences, when things like tonal balance, preferences, budget, tube nervosa vs. non, and other things outweigh ultimate resolution. If I gave a shit about that I probably would've held onto my 445.

I am curious to hear the T4 though.

 

Yeah, but his only qualifier was resolution for comparison. I'm sure he's weighed the other things with his own preferences to purchase what he wanted. I know he loves his Bakoon amp.

 

Yes.

And I inferred that mere resolving ability is a poor way of deciding on which amp to buy. There may some newbie about to raid his kids' college fund right now or go into debt in order to buy some uber-MOAR-resolving amp for big bucks, because he's been bamboozled into thinking that's the deciding factor for musical enjoyment. When in fact, an amp's ability to resolve fine details is not as important as things like budget, tonal preferences, tube nervosa vs. non, etc., when it comes to your personal ability to enjoy music. Head fi does stuff like that. Let's not.

 

I think "resolution" in the audio world is just another on-the-rise Google ngram term chart topper in the sea change that happened in more recent years—a move (or obsession, depending on whom you're talking to) toward better SINAD, minutiae or vanity measurements, "transparency", and yes, resolution.

In the old days of hifi, before many of us were even born, people talked about "tone" and I don’t mean FR, but that je nais se qua of a piece of equipment's soul. To me, It's beyond mere coloration, it's a few key qualities which all exist somewhere within wide-band spectrums.

Again, in my lexicon, "tone" means a combination of the warm-cool spectrum, plus factors like where a piece of kit lands in the round-square/sharp band, and, perhaps most importantly, the wet-dry dichotomy.

So when @ColtMrFire rightly says there's much more to the delicate equation and mentions "tonal balance" as one of those x-factors, that's what I imagine—you can have warmer, roundish, wetter gear that has lively macrodynamics and nuanced microdynamics, or you can have, on the other side of things, cooler, sharper and drier gear with limp dick macro and zero microdyna, or vice versa!

And the thing is—to get to the matter at hand—the former can have lesser (relatively speaking) resolving abilities and sound far, far, far better than the latter (cf. lightly modded Crack vs. Magnius), and more to that point, the latter can be the most resolving piece of gear you've ever heard, and still sound like shit bc of its ham-fisted tonal balance.

tldr: resolution isn't everything. just like distortion isn't. just like ruler-flat measurements aren't.

 

I own DSHA-3F and Oor, and I've owned BW2. ZMF headphones (Auteur, Verité, Atrium), upsampled Holo Spring 2 DAC. BW2 was bold, dynamic, tonally dense, at some expense in less fine detail and a slight smearing of edges & boundaries. In hindsight, maybe the wrong amp for a DAC and headphones that are also on the bold(er), denser side of the ledger. I ended up selling mine as I wasn't listening to it much compared with the 3F (and the neighboring Stellaris Special). But this is not a criticism of BW2, I think that with leaner DAC and headphones it would have been hard to let go, given how lively it was.

 

It's almost as if synergy and subjective preferences trump cherry-picked objective traits. My HD800/Master 9/Ref 7 was probably the most transparent, dead nut neutral, pink panther'd approved sound I've yet heard...but also the most lifeless, boring, flat-as-a-pancake ss sound I've ever heard too. Thank heavens for that hands on experience, truly...

 

I think it's important to remember that audiophiles, especially the special breed of "informed" audiophiles on this site, are INCREDIBLY spoiled. We have access to the best headphone and speaker amps in the world, that perform well above and beyond the much more expensive typical TOTL summit-fi gear featured in audiophile lifestyle magazines. Even introductory level DNA/Eddie Current/ECP-DSHA/A&S are already operating at the same or usually even a level above the mega kilobuck ORFAS "summit-fi" gear. This is why I said every amp Craig made was meant to be end game for somebody... doesn't matter if it's a $7K Studio or $1.2K Black Widow. There is a threshold level of resolving ability these amps are already operating at that is far above most overpriced garbage out there, and should be more than enough for most humans with ears. This is why I say we are spoiled and need to remember things like this.