High-End Tube Delight and Audiophile Fun Have Just Become Affordable
ProLogue
Stefan Krawczyk: I am one of those music-loving audio-enthusiasts who always looked with longing eyes at the Jadisses, Cary’s, Conrad Johnsons and the Unison Researches of this world (just to mention a few) without having the guts to go all the way. Often I listened with yearning ears to good tube amplifiers at my dealer’s but I always ended up investing my audio buck instead in safe solid-state bets. After years of upgrading, trading in and tweaking I am now the very happy owner of some pretty good stuff from Theta, Krell, Transparent and Sonus Faber (needless to say where all of this was bought). In my rather lively mid-size listening room my carefully assembled system sounds really great and, before going all the way with a dedicated 5.1 surround SACD/DVD-A set-up, I enjoy high-quality stereo music.
When I recently was about to get a visit from Rob Wilms of Dé HifiWinkel in Beek for the delivery of my new turntable, Herman from Durob Audio made me a proposition I could certainly not refuse. Herman is not only the "co-architect" of my current system (the other one is of course Ken Kessler….), but he also knows my taste for good high-end, especially of the kind that scores high marks for the price-quality ratio. He sent Rob to my place with the turntable and, as a bonus, he added a special and, as it turned out, excessively charming and highly enjoyable temporary guest with a request to listen to it and write down my impressions. The guest was none other than the spectacular newcomer in the growing range of affordable products developed and marketed by Durob under their various house brands: the PrimaLuna ProLogue One.
What a sexy name! Those who have seen and heard this machine will agree with me that the name is not the only sexy part of this very appealing, slick and shiny integrated tube amplifier. Apart from name and looks, built quality, user-friendliness and reliability, the real critical elements of any amplifier in my view are sound quality (within the relevant context) and price. I can tell you that, as far as the PrimaLuna ProLogue One is concerned, the two latter are at least as sexy as the name.
Durob boasts this amplifier offers sensational sound for a sensationally low price. In hifi land such claims are quite common. Every now and again I visit one of my dealers and ask them about the latest "flavour of the month" and all too often one bumps into what will be presented as a "super bargain". Unfortunately, the tough truth is that in virtually all cases you get what you pay for, nothing more and often even less. Pleasant surprises are indeed very rare. However, let me tell you straight away: the ProLogue One is a great exception to that rule. It plays the stars from heaven for what I would humbly describe as a floorboard-breaking price in the utterly positive sense of the term. Intrigued? Read on!
MonoLogue
I have now spent about two delightful weeks with this integrated tube baby in my otherwise quite demanding system. For some pictures and a brief description of its main features I kindly refer you to the www.hifi-notes.com web site, where you will read the following: "This 15kg heavy integrated line-amplifier (29cm wide x 38cm deep x 20cm high) with 2 x 35W power (8 Ohms) uses high quality parts and is fully hard-wired (no pc-board). Following tubes are used: 2 x 12AU7, 2 x AX7 for the pre-amplification and 4 x EL34 in push-pull for the power-stage. The amplifier has 4 line-inputs and multi-tap outputs."
I did not open the machine, but I fully trust those who did, and they all confirmed the claim made on the website about excellent quality hard-wiring. The amplifier comes well protected in a solid carton box and is accompanied by – a very nice detail – a pair of white cotton gloves and a mains cable. The front plate is made of heavy, 1 cm thick brushed black aluminium and includes the source selection button on the right, the volume button on the left (no remote control) and the blue power led in the middle. A cage of bluish-black metal protects the tubes and the transformers are also covered with a metal protective housing.
Installing and start-up are easy. Unscrew the four screws of the tube cage (use a magnetic screwdriver, because the screws are small and two of them are not easy to attend), take off the protective plastic cover that lies over the tubes, connect sources and speakers (Note 1: there are two alternative positive speaker terminals: 8 Ohm or 4 Ohm, so check the impedance of your speakers first. Note 2: the binding posts are great for bare wire, banana plugs and big spades, but my standard Transparent spades did not fit, so I used screwed-on gold-plated banana plugs from Monster) and switch on the machine. The power-switch is on the left side of the amp, out of sight, but very easy to reach.
The PrimaLuna ProLogue One invited me to provide the full luxury treatment. So, I sat ‘her’ on a dedicated SolidSteel amp stand, I gave her three Nordost Pulsar points for further decoupling and I connected her to my mains via the Tice Infinite Speed power cable (the standard cable happened to be slightly too short in my specific set-up – PrimaLuna has a place of honour in the middle of the listening room). Despite the official output power of 35 watts into 8Ohm (only 14% of my reference Theta Dreadnaught) and the traditional assumption that Sonus Faber Guarneris with their sensitivity of 86-87dB are quite power-hungry, I hooked the PrimaLuna up to these wonderful loudspeakers for my review. For this connection I used the excellent Transparent Music Wave Super Bicables. The Theta DS ProBasic D/A converter and the freshly installed Michell TecnoDec + AH! phonostage were connected to the ProLogue One with 8Ft of Transparent Ultra single ended cables. Serious listening began after about 100-120 hours of burn-in.
What struck me first with this integrated was the loudness in combination with a clean, very clear but not clinical or thin sound. Granted, my Theta converter delivers about 3.5-4 Volt RMS via its single-ended output (in balanced mode it is more like 8 Volts!), but I did have the same impression with the turntable/phonostage. Driving the not-so-sensitive Guarneris, the ProLogue One with its volume set at 9 o’ clock or even less (!) played more than loud enough for my (12x18 Ft) listening room. It delivered any kind of music in a non-distorted and transparent manner. From the Linkin Park Meteora on vinyl (sounds better than the CD), which is as far away you can get from sweet bed-time lullabies, to the highly dynamic Reference recordings HDCD Sampler 2, the well-known Jazz at the Pawnshop with all its little ambient jazz club noises and potentially very deep image, and the versatile voice of Patricia Barber, all of this was delivered with verve and talent by this great little integrated.
The tubes seemed to add the necessary human warmth to this (just enough, not too much) and must have played a key role in creating its great sound stage. The musical reproduction went beyond and behind the speakers. Sonus Faber speakers are usually good at the famous ‘disappearing act’, but it is my experience that this works only after a careful set up process and with the right ancillaries. This time, I did not move the speakers an inch from their initial set-up. I just connected the new amplifier and played and, still, it worked. The Guarneris disappeared. The sound stage is wide, quite deep and tends to be relatively towards the back (as opposed to being up-front).
What also struck me were the ‘air’ around instruments and voices, as well as the presentation of details. Some equipment lets you hear every single tiny detail, but it is presented in such a manner that you almost only hear the details and the overall presentation loses its coherence or does not come through as is should. With the PrimaLuna I really heard all the detail I could wish for (sometimes it seemed I heard even more than through my reference system, which costs about 12 times as much as the ProLogue One. Or was it just presented differently?). However, unlike with the bulk of MidFi systems, the detail was there in a transparent and natural way and was not thrown in my face.
Does the ProLogue One favour any musical genre? I don’t think so and that is what makes this, in my view, a real, solid, above entry-level high-end product. I am fully aware that there are tube products out there that will beat the ProLogue One in certain areas. But these will cost substantially more and, as I found to be very often the case, these high-end elite products excel with certain well-recorded musical genres (usually closely-miked female voices, small jazz ensembles, chamber music, etc.), but dramatically fall through when it comes down to catering for a much wider choice of software, both in terms of genre and in terms of recording quality. Working with this amplifier was always great fun and really never left me frustrated in any way. I think fun and being able to play all different kinds of music are two of the most important elements of the high-end hobby.
As far as the ProLogue One is concerned, the only small criticism I would have is the not completely stellar performance in the lower and lowest registers. This could of course be partly due to the Guarneris, which do need some firm control in the bass. Nevertheless, the mild woolliness in the lows (a) did not veil the excellent mid and high performance, so details, as I said, came more than perfectly through and (b) did not undermine or jeopardise the rhythm and speed of the music I played through this amplifier. I might not recommend, as one so often reads/hears, this amplifier to someone who owns difficult speakers and who strongly favours massive organ concertos and/or house-type head-banging walls of heavy metal. This being said, the Linkin Park boys I had perform via the ProLogue One sang loud enough to make my neighbours very nervous and never sounded as if someone had stolen their base guitar and drum before the recording was made. The bottom line is that this is one integrated amplifier I would (and in fact already did) without any hesitation recommend to any friend, colleague or relative, be it a would-be audiophile or not, looking for a new amplifier or an upgrade from whatever they currently play with.
Anyone who invests the perfectly acceptable €950 in the ProLogue One will, in my opinion, be able to get the same kind of satisfaction from playing the latest Chesky SACD album of Sara K. as from playing an old vinyl copy of Deep Purple’s Made in Japan (well, at least I did) as it will always sound better, more involving and more musically satisfying than when played on a mass-market set-up. The mere fact that the ProLogue One was perfectly capable of making the relatively difficult and demanding Guarneris sing and show off their best is enough proof for me that this modestly priced wonder will quickly find a large fan-base.
Because of its democratic retail price, it will most probably represent the decisive argument for the large group of undecided audiophile would-be’s, who would love to take that step and move to the next quality level, but who are put off by the often excessive prices. Durob Audio, with its decades of experience in this field and its great team of technicians, not to mention the exemplary after-sales service, seem to have found a niche in the market. I congratulate them for taking pro-active steps to fill this void and to bring a great-sounding and very affordable product to the market.
EpiLogue
The buyer of a ProLogue One today is, because of the great qualities of this product, in my view, very likely to develop a taste for the high-end hobby. Ten years ago I started the hobby buying a simple Marantz CD player with a digital output. At that time, a company called Audio Alchemy put very affordable D/A converters on the market. I bought the famous DDE V1.0, which clearly improved the sound of my player and, thus, my musical enjoyment. In the meantime, encouraged by that small but very satisfactory investment, I have given a lot of money to producers and retailers of high-end equipment, always investing with a sharp eye on the price-performance ratio and always further improving the performance of my system. I am confident that, if Durob and its retailers keep their current long-term view on the development and marketing of high-end products, many audiophiles with mega-buck set-ups in 2013 will look back and say, with a vain of nostalgia: "It all started ten years ago, when I bought this great affordable piece of sexy tube kit called PrimaLuna ProLogue One………….".
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