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Originally Posted by JoeN
That’s nice!!! What type of speakers do you think it would sound best with?
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Any of them. Any speaker. At any load. Won't matter. It'll sound fabulous, regardless.
One of the hallmark traits of Constellation gear, I'm told from someone who owns a lot of Constellation gear, including the Argo integrated and Perseus/Virgo/Centaur separates that it is very stable and consistent driving virtually any loudspeaker impedance load.
I don't have extensive experience with integrateds, but its right up there with the best of the other integrated amps I have experience with, and that's DarTZeel and Viva. Both of those are sublime, and the Inspiration is right there with them.
And, my impressions have only gotten more positive over the last day or so; the Inspiration is continuing to burn in and become more spacious and open-sounding as well as increasingly layered and articulated in the presentation. It's still exceedingly neutral, but it has a naturalness and as Hans Beekhuizen says, "relaxed" quality to it that makes it very engaging to listen to.
I'm now considering how to scrape together the funds to buy one. The Inspiration is so quiet, so neutral, so uncolored, accurate, clean, defined, spacious, and refined-sounding with a solid and defined bottom-end that it would really make for an excellent "reviewing platform" for all other components. So far, it supports my hypothesis that it would be an outstanding "laboratory instrument" in that would provide a "reference standard" against which other system components could be most accurately reviewed, knowing the "amplification subsystem" is maximally quiet, accurate, neutral, dynamic, resolving, and transparent. Hope that makes sense...
Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeN
How’s the N20 eval going?
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Really well. It's next in the queue after I finish up the c-j ART 150 review this week.
It's one of the best designed, executed, and implemented and manufactured pieces of audio gear I have ever used. It's superbly made, incredibly easy to set up and get rolling, and easy to use. It's somewhat surprising in some sense that something that simply pulls files from an internal disk or an online streaming service and sends it to a DAC could have so much impact on the sound quality, but...it does. And...it sounds absolutely fantastic.
It's damn near perfect, and in my book, if it functioned as a Roon endpoint, it would be perfect.