System Details
| Integrated Amplifier | Ypsilon Phaethon |
|---|---|
| Speakers | Wilson Benesch Discovery 3Zero |
| Bass Augmentation | Wilson Benesch IGx |
| Cables | Stage III Concepts Typhon |
How does it sound?
Has a system ever surprised you? Where the way it actually sounds is VERY different from what you were expecting? Well… this system will absolutely shock you. Let’s start with setting some expectations. What do have here?
We have an integrated amplifier producing 110W (@ 8 Ohm), a couple of stand mount speakers, a kind of subwoofer(?) and some cables from a little known brand. OK, so what can we expect?
Many people have systems with this combination, especially in smaller listening rooms. In fact, this type of system was considered quintessentially English not that long ago due to the smaller listening spaces in the UK. We know that stand mounts generally image better but need help with bass. The subwoofer will help, but as we know, subwoofers are difficult to integrate seamlessly and tend to be noticed as a separate sound source in the room. We can probably expect a bit of mid bass deficit or at least an energy imbalance between the midrange and upper bass frequencies. So in summary, we can expect a great image, top-notch speed but limited soundstage and uneven frequency presentation.
The actual experience of this system couldn’t be further from this description. As expected, the imaging is first class and there’s a speed and transient snap that’s incredible. However the soundstage is unexpectedly wide, naturally high and deep to the virtual horizon. Far from there being a mid-bass suck-out, the lower bass is fast, deep and rich and this remains the case as you move up the frequencies and enter the midrange and above. There is no hint of a subwoofer anywhere, but rather a seamless well of deep, fast, tuneful bass with proper chest cavity pressurizing energy.
If you had a blindfold on (and yes, we have done this exercise on unsuspecting visitors), you would bet your house that you were listening to a full range large floor standing reference speaker system. In particular, the ability of this system to create a holographic image of the artist in front of you is truly rare. There’s a palpability… a 3-dimensionality that is in the upper echelon of hi-fi system performance at any price. Play music that has intricate detail or nuanced moments where one aspect shifts ever so slightly and it is articulated perfectly. You will have plenty of those type of ‘wow moments’. Play music where there are a lot of elements playing at the same time and it doesn’t ‘pull it apart’ but it somehow manages to articulate each element perfectly so you can hear every part of the music separately and in it’s own space. If you are someone who tends to play music at lower volume levels, then this system will blow your mind because you can hear ‘everything’ at one notch on your volume control.
This system is also highly tuneable, being great for awkward listen room shapes or any listening environment where getting the bass correct is a perennial problem. This is because the speakers are very accurate and do not present any overlap issues coupled with the fact that the infrasonic generator (IGx) is very adjustable in terms of level and phase. If your listening room has long stumps under the floor or some kind of large cavity below the floor, you will never get a balanced bass response from a floor standing speaker with fixed bass output. This system can bend and twist to work in 99.9% of possible realistic listening environments.
The system sounds uncoloured, accurate, fast and detailed without in any way losing tonal & timbral quality. It sounds more ‘accurate to the source’ that many systems further up in cost in this series.
We have met many audiophiles who are trapped in a never-ending journey of tyring to find components that have a certain sound which will counter-act something that is undesirable in their system or looking for a component that can add that extra something that is missing in their system. How many times have you heard comments like “I think this cable will add some warmth”, or “I think these speakers will tame some brightness”, or “this amp has more bass”… etc. Once you buy this next component that ‘adds warmth’ then if you change something else in your system in the future, you may have ‘too much warmth’. Then you need to find something else that solves that problem… and on and on it goes. Some audiophiles even convince themselves that this never ending search is so much fun! There are probably a few who get their enjoyment from equipment churning but in our experience, given the cost of acquiring quality equipment and the financial loss that is often experienced when selling gear, most audiophiles would much prefer to have systems that provide great enjoyment and do not need to be changed.
If you can relate to this, please take note of this system because you will get off the equipment merry-go-round with this system.
Read here about the equipment Merry-Go-Round.
What you have here is in our opinion, the best or at least one of the best integrated amps in the world which produces a very natural sound connected to a set of super-transparent speakers that simply get out of the way and just present what the amp is producing, connected by a cable system that specialises in preserving the inherent energy in the musical performance. All three of these components are elite level in what they do and sound as if they were designed to work with each other from the beginning. Perfect synergy for the audiophile who wants a sound that is accurate and faithful to the original recording.
This system is highly resolved. It has an ability to extract a lot of musical information and micro-details from the recorded file and communicate them as a cohesive whole. Present them as an intricate, precise sonic picture with all of the tonal, timbral & spatial cues in order. It also means that the timing of the music is spot on, and as many people have commented, the PRAT (Pace, Rhythm and Timing) is at the heart of a musically satisfying experience.
However (and this is a BIG however), most systems that are highly resolving PRAT specialists tend to have some characteristics which are undesirable to some listeners. They tend to focus so much on the definition of each note, that they can sound a bit etched, slightly bright and fatiguing to the ear. Sometimes in an effort to get all the details out and presented to the listener, they lose a bit of tone and ‘naturalness’ and they start to sound like hi-fi, like a poor facsimile of the real event rather than resembling the real event.
In order to avoid that common pitfall, hi-fi equipment tends to get very expensive. There are many ways to produce a detailed, information-rich sound without the etch & fatigue but these ways are expensive to implement. This is one of the reasons this system is so special. It overcomes those common issues to give you a highly resolved yet natural, easy, flowing, enthralling sound. Lots of detail, without the ‘digit-itis’.
You know what happens when you can hear more musical information but in a natural, non-fatiguing way? You hear more of the very essence of what’s giving you the enjoyment. It’s like the difference between a glass of Johnnie Walker Red Label and a glass of Sullivans Cove French Oak Single Malt. Both glasses contain whiskey but… very different experiences.
This system is fun! It has all the qualities to keep the most ardent audiophile happy but it just hunkers down and plays music in a way that makes you forget about all that audiophile stuff and just get lost in the artist’s story. It is a music explorer’s dream. It also sounds like a bigger system. Despite its modest dimensions, it has a big expansive sound, large soundstage and great tonal character. It communicates the fundamentals of the music with a solid grass-roots practical ease and a touch of whimsical sophistication.
Why does it work so well?
Please forgive us for going on a tangent, but there’s a story we would like to share with you that best illustrates the critical reasons for why this system sounds the way it does. In recent years during a trip to Europe, we visited a gentleman who is one of the most respected personalities in high-end audio. He manufactures incredible custom-built amplifiers of the highest quality but is also renowned for creating complete systems for his lucky clients… systems that are easily among the very best that we have ever experienced.
During our visit, he took us to visit one of his clients, who kindly hosted a wonderful afternoon of eclectic music, matched only by the quality of the food and his generous hospitality – one of the most memorable audio experiences we’ve ever had. This gentleman had purchased a pair of well known, top of the range ‘statement’ speakers a few months earlier and had been unhappy with the sound and our friend had worked on the system and now it was very enjoyable. It must be noted that the listening room was unusually large.
We noticed that the big new floor standing speakers had been highly modified with the bass drivers missing and instead, in the back corners of this huge listening room were two large active subwoofer units the size of a small kitchen refrigerator. We asked the designer “Why did you make these modifications?”
He explained that no floor standing speaker can really make useful bass below 40Hz because the cabinet volume required to do so is so large, it would make the speakers physically too big to place in a living room environment. By useful bass, he referred to proportional, balanced, realistic bass energy. He explained that given the restrictions of the laws of physics, most manufacturers therefore created speakers that could measure down to 20-30Hz, but very little of that bass had the required energy to fill a listening space and make a meaningful contribution to the sonic picture. Therefore, his philosophy was to take away the bass making duties away from the speaker completely, at least from the point where it starts to become compromised and give those duties to purpose-built specialist devices (subwoofers).
He then explained that if you were able to create a subwoofer system of the required speed and quality (VERY DIFFICULT), you didn’t want bass drivers on the speaker system competing with it. He preferred to minimise the number of drivers that are overlapping and trying to do the same thing. Different driver technologies all trying to interpret the music at a particular frequency creates smear and distortion. Give the sole responsibility to the best component and let it do its job. Minimal drivers of the highest quality, not competing with each other, all working in harmony. This system implements this philosophy.
At the heart of this system we have the Ypsilon Phaethon integrated amplifier. We understand that the cost of this amplifier is more than many people’s separates combined but if you compare it with the world’s best integrated amplifiers at the very top of the tree, it is not only great value… it is a bargain. In terms of ‘what’s in the box’, the Phaethon stands alone in a world full of ever increasingly expensive high-end audio integrated amplifiers. It’s a hybrid line level amplifier utilising only three active gain stages. The input and driver stages incorporate low noise valves operating in a single-ended class A topography. It also features a transformer attenuator built in-house, embedded in the preamplifier section using advanced post-attenuation techniques.
The tube driver stage is coupled to the output stage with a wide bandwidth inter-stage transformer that provides perfect phase splitting for the output stage. The output stage features same polarity semiconductors for both phases in a “balanced single-ended architecture”, resulting in the sonic quality of pure single-ended designs combined with the power of push-pull designs. There are separate power supplies for the tube and output stage utilising five power supply inductors for low noise filtering. All these technologies are designed to operate in unison offering unmatched sound quality, thus providing a clear advantage of a single chassis, compact and cost-effective integrated amplifier platform. There are 3 design features that combine to give the Phaethon a sound quality that takes it to the summit of integrated amplifier performance:
- In-house custom made high quality transformer attenuator (volume control) results in highly open transparent sound free from artefacts.
- Only three gain stages. One of them the active preamp stage with tubes. This results in a clarity / purity of sound.
- Unique “bridged single-ended” output stage biased in class A for the ‘first most important watts’, results in an immediacy, direct emotional connection.
Applying this level of design topology and componentry is rare and expensive. It is important to note that no other manufacturer attempts this topology. One of the reasons is that it is difficult to do but the main reason is that it is virtually impossible to buy these types of transformers from a supplier. You literally have to make them yourself and anyone with experience in audio electronics design will tell you that making your own transformers at this level is very difficult to do from a know-how and cost perspective. This is why many refer to it as the ‘lost art of transformer winding’.
Prior to the arrival of the Phaethon, it was considered virtually impossible to achieve this level of sound quality from a one box amplification solution. It is one of those amplifiers that you simply fall in love with and just want to have in your life. Everything is so natural, just flows and feels so real, so involving and effortless. There’s a primal yet sophisticated quality to the Phaethon’s way with music.
Given the performance, reputation and pedigree of their separate amplifier pieces, when Ypsilon decided to build an integrated amplifier, much anticipation was expressed by the audiophile community. The resulting Phaethon integrated amplifier represented a bit of a watershed moment in modern amplifier design, re-defining a new level of sonic performance previously unheard in integrated designs. Imagine if Bugatti decided to release a sports car under $50K. Very unlikely, I know, but just go with it. If they did, wouldn’t it be a mouth-watering proposition? Imagine driving an affordable sports car made by the same people that make a $5m hyper-car. With their expertise & pedigree, imagine how they would design and spec it. Imagine what it would be like to drive! This is certainly a colourful analogy but it’s not far from what the Phaethon represents.
The Wilson Benesch Discovery 3Zero has a design which is equally unique and you can write a book describing the insane technology this speaker incorporates. It has a midrange driver on top, a tweeter below and two bass drivers configured in a clam-shell isobaric arrangement tucked away behind the tweeter in a stand mount design featuring a unique advanced bio-carbon composite cabinet shaped in a way to diffuse back-wave reflections in the listening room. Did you get that?
We published a video featuring this speaker which is really worth watching here. The unique configuration of the drivers results in an unusual set of talents. Predictably, imaging is elite level. Unpredictably, the two bass drivers that are not immediately visually noticeable produce a surprising amount of bass from what appears to be a stand mount speaker. Surprisingly, this configuration presents the music like a point-source speaker – like a single driver speaker but with no compression, no distortion and proper frequency extension. This detail is an important part of the magic of this speaker. It does not produce a wall of sound where locating the various instrument and singer locations is difficult. It does the opposite! Everything has a specific location in the soundstage. There’s a precision and resolving power here that is present without sounding like one of those audiophile scalpel systems that pull the music apart. The sound here has precision with soul.
Earlier in this description, we mentioned the idea of allocating the duty of making deep bass to a specialised device. This is no revelation in concept but this system is a revelation in execution. Why? Because any seasoned audiophile can describe the shear difficulty of integrating a subwoofer coherently into a system. Integrating a slower, heavier driver, often made from a different material to your speaker bass drivers has proven to be very difficult and has created an anti-subwoofer culture among a section of the audiophile community. The world has been waiting for the seemingly impossible – a device that is so fast that it can seamlessly blend into a main system and provide that infrasonic energy without drawing attention to itself.
After an extraordinary amount of research and development, Wilson Benesch recently introduced the IGx (Infrasonic Generator). There are many reasons that they do not refer to it as a subwoofer and in truth, the design here is nothing like a subwoofer. Incorporating a push-pull motor design, a rounded geometric enclosure that mimics real instruments and a super lightweight Carbon Fibre – Polyethylene Terephthalate diaphragm, the IGx delivers lightning fast, highly integrated, perfectly resolved low frequency sound that physically moves you. Timpani, kick drums, kettle drums, electronic deep bass notes… all low frequency sonic structures are rendered with attack and dynamics that hit you in the chest. In our opinion, every system should have an IGx (or two) but this system is optimised for it.
Stage III Concepts is one of those cable companies that flies under the radar of over-hyped audiophile media but is well known by the connoisseurs wherever you go. Luis de la Fuente in the USA is one of those genius types who quietly works away pushing the envelope of cable technology with no fanfare but then when you research his cables, you discover that they exist in some of the world’s most renowned systems.
Products like his Poseidon power cables, Cerberus speaker cables and Ckahron interconnects define state-of-the-art and require a serious financial investment but in this system, we use his ‘entry level’ cables, which is a play of words because what is entry-level for Stage III Concepts is statement level for many other brands. The Typhon cable range can be described as imparting a minimal character into the music and having a knack of preserving the intrinsic energy of a performance. They sound more ‘live’ than other cable brands at this price range and have an airy, open sound, especially in the higher frequencies. Having a silver conductor material gives them a fast, resolving, detailed sound but without the glare or etch of some silver cables that we have heard in the past. A perfect piece of the jigsaw puzzle that makes this system.
Finally, let’s contemplate the ‘uniqueness’ of this system.
- Can you name one other integrated amplifier in the world that uses a hybrid design utilising only three active gain stages and inter-state transformers? Nope.
- Can you name one other speaker system that utilises a pair of bass drivers tucked behind the tweeter in a clam-shell isobaric configuration? No way!
- Can you think of any low frequency generator with a dual motor system driving a large Polyethylene Terephthalate diaphragm. No!
Either can we – because nothing like that exists anywhere in the audio spectrum. If you own this system, there’s no part of it (with the exception of the cables) that can be directly compared to any other existing component. There are no ‘me too’ parts here – everything is pure innovation and cutting-edge unique design. And it sounds like it.
What changes could you make to the system?
If you wanted to save money, but maintain the sonic qualities and synergy of this system, you can try:
- We wouldn’t change a thing. Can’t have this sound for a lower budget to the best of our knowledge.
If your budget extended a bit further and you wanted to upscale this system, you can try:
- Replacing the Wilson Benesch Discovery 3Zero speakers with the Wilson Benesch A.C.T. 3Zero speakers will give you more scale and a slightly sweeter, more relaxed sound where the system sounds like some tension has been removed, or it is not working so hard to achieve the same level of performance.
- Replace the Phaethon with a Phaethon SE (Silver Edition). The only change is that the transformers are now pure silver with the input units also sporting nanocrystalline cores. This is a significant step up in cost and will take the sound up into the stratosphere. We have clients who are running Wilson Benesch Eminence and Zellaton speakers ($300K+) with Phaethon SE amplifiers with stunning results.
- You can upgrade the Stage III cables to Gorgon & Medusa level cables with a huge lift in dynamic contrast, detail and tonal shading.
Why London?
One of the true iconic cultural epicentres in the world, London is full of surprises. It exerts a strong influence on… pretty much everything and despite its long history, economic power and having the largest concentration of higher education institutions in Europe, it remains a place of diverse cultural and artistic expression. It’s also hard to imagine one city that has made a greater contribution to music.
Explore London and one thing is for sure – you will find uniqueness, artistic unpredictability and surprise whichever nook and cranny you poke your head into. This city just has a talent for being the birthplace of ideas, a melting pot of emotions, a kaleidoscope of diversity… all of these energies combine for it to be a place that sparks an idea, sets a trend.
The London system is comprised of individual components that are totally unique, combining to form a synergy that is otherworldly. Throw your expectations away and sit on the edge of your seat, for you do not know what’s around the corner. London’s depth of experiences can enthral you, nurture you or simply present you with a cultural mirror for you to contemplate.
There’s a celebration of the human condition here with all of its agonies and ecstasies, a type of experience that directly connects you into the energy of expression. Welcome to the London system. Press play and be captivated.
