Jan van Hezewijk: This story is about my first -ever- Valve X-perience … Just the other day, I was browsing the internet and my surfboard stopped at hifi-notes.com. I noticed some noise about a small tube’d amplifier and it made me wonder … I was “in the market” for a 1250/1500 Euro amplifier to drive my Tannoy Super Red monitors. They ever told me to drive them with vacuum tubes … No way, because I am so totally not into jazz/classical and audiophile bladyblabla: Break Beats / Trip Hop and Trance House is my kind of cake! So just out of curiosity I called the PrimaLuna people at DÉ Hifiwinkel in Eindhoven. Marcel invited me to come over to check it out and convinced me by his own experiences with Tannoy Little Gold Monitors, D500’s and old timer Eaton’s, he owned in the past. So off I went and with a stash of CD’s I entered a whole new world …
The man already had made a can of coffee and made me sit in the “sweet spot chair”. Informed me about the tubed Njoe Tjoeb cd-player, placed and connected my Super Red’s I brought and there it was! Was this really the speaker I already own for years now? Hell no … I thought he was fooling me and tried to hoax with an extra set of loudspeakers, somewhere … But it turned out to be that the only speakers playing, were my old Red’s. My goodness … The first disc I wanted to hear was some old school trip hop, Massive Attack, Blue Lines. This disc has loads of bass and my NAD/Super Red combo never gave away the recorded bass “slam” … This combo did! Deep thunderous bass and an incredible sense of rhythmic bass performance I only know from live concerts. My Red’s happen to have high sensitivity (as Marcel told me …) and they are very easy to drive, causing way to high volume levels at unbelievable realistic dynamics, making dust tumble down from the ceiling! What fun! Now it was time to play some S.B. break beats. I had recorded several CDR’s from my mighty 12” Maxi-single collection. What a drive! How can such old technique produce so many fast beats per second in a very convincing way. I just couldn’t sit still. My feet are tapping along constantly.
“Is this for real?”, I asked Marcel and he asked me for even more “hard to play” tunes, he seemed to like a lot … So hit me with some Orb, DJ Marcello! And he actually knows it … But now he asked me to pay attention. “Watch the soundscape”, he said … What an amazing experience this is. I actually hear the same atmospheric sounds, like a holographic sound picture, surrounding me from all around … “Well”, Marcel explained, “this is STEREO!”. Oh, wow. I want more of this. So we discussed and we came up with a plan. I bought the PrimaLuna ProLogue One, wrote this article, got 100 Euro for it, so I still had left 650 Euro to spend and bought myself also a standard Njoe Tjoeb with interconnect cable … Am I an audiophile now? Well, call me what you want, but I am a very happy man right now … I suffer from this virus already! One day I am going to sue these PrimaLuna guys for keeping me out of my bed! Boy this is fun. Even my late eighties CD’s sound amazingly nice. I just found Public Enemy, Big Daddy Kane and N.W.A CD’s, lying there for years and years. Can’t wait to play them! Cheers and thanx a lot for hooking me up with this PrimaLuna”tic” X-perience ...