My first high-end component was an Audio Note M2 preamplifier, which I bought from former Audio Note distributor/current Stereophile contributor Michael Trei. (Senior Contributing Editor Herb Reichert was Michael’s partner in that 1990s-era Audio Note venture.) Herb can regale you with tales of motoring across the Soviet Union in an unheated Mercedes, trunk full of Audio Note components and American dollars, but that’s a story for another review (most likely to be written by Herb).
The Audio Note M2 preamplifier was one of the most transparent audio products I’d ever heard, its single 6SN7 tube extremely sensitive to tube rolling. I spent countless hours researching RCA 5692s, Mullard ECC32s, RCA VT231s, and Sylvania 6SN7s and trying them out in the M2, each new, used, or new-old-stock tube producing stark differences in resolution, tone, soundstage, bass extension, and immediacy.
NOS tubes were cheap in the 1990s. I had boxes of them, especially of versions of the 6SN7 triode used in the M2. One frigid night, I rescued boxes of ancient radio tubes from an abandoned building on the corner of Mott and Houston in Soho, now a fashionable district with exorbitant rents, barely a 10-minute walk from Fi, Don Garber’s fabled shop at 30 Watts Street. How times and real estate values have changed.
I’ve covered Audio Note rooms at several recent hi-fi shows. After one recent show, Audio Note owner/CEO Peter Qvortrup asked me if I’d like to review one of their most recently introduced products, the Audio Note Meishu Phono 300B Tonmeister. After a quick consultation with Editor Jim Austin, I said yes.
Heavy-duty hi-fi
The Meishu Phono 300B Tonmeister ($19,300) is a class-A, zero negative feedback, single-ended-triode (SET) integrated amplifier. It weighs about 65lb and started shipping in late 2019. I brought it up the stairs to my sixth-floor walkup listening warren with help from Audio Note confrere Robert Lighton. The Meishu Phono’s new pair of Psvane Standard Hifi Series 300B tubes required 1–200 hours to hit their stride, advised NYC Audio Note tech Ben Jacoby. Burn-in commenced.
Lighton also brought along an Audio Note S4 SUT so that I could use the Tonmeister, which has a phono stage that’s MM-only, with my MC cartridges.
Generating just 8Wpc into 4 or 8 ohms, the aluminum-encased Meishu Phono 300B stands a stout 18.1″ wide × 20.9″ deep, and 8.7″ tall. Its weight is mostly in its transformer-bearing rear, which makes hauling it up stairs and moving it on and off my equipment rack a challenging and noisy exercise (grunts, groans, and other emanations). The Meishu’s back panel is made of 3mm acrylic; its fascia, 10mm acrylic.
The Meishu Tonmeister’s volume control—no remote control here—is designed in-house at Audio Note and manufactured by an outside contractor based in the UK. The amp’s snazzy gold knobs are “made for us in Taiwan to our design, as are the RCA jacks, which are plated with 50 microns of silver. XLRs are by Neutrik,” Qvortrup said.
Made for us, or by us, was a common theme in my conversations with Audio Note folks. All Audio Note products are assembled by the company’s 28 full-time employees in the West Sussex Audio Note factory. “We make many of our parts in-house, [including] all signal transformers, signal capacitors, the top-of-the-range Pallas low-capacitance cables for digital, [and] attenuators,” Qvortrup told me. “We make or commission all sonically critical parts, from the way our wires are drawn and the materials in our cables, to the manufacturing technology in our nonmagnetic tantalum and niobium resistors.” Audio Note–branded electrolytic capacitors are made to the company’s specs by Japan’s Rubycon Corporation. “We make our MC cartridges in house from scratch, as well. We have about 4000 processes in our document library.”
Audio Note’s careful selection and control of critical parts is said to play a major role in the hallowed Audio Note sound, including its unerring naturalism.
“The output transformer, interstage transformer, and coupling capacitors are all made in-house at our factory in the UK,” Audio Note transformer expert Andy Grove wrote in an email. “We use whatever materials and techniques get the performance we require, which means some of our equipment is quite traditional and hands-on but other pieces are very modern and high-tech, such as our CNC winding machines. We have large stocks of Kraft paper, Nomex, Kapton, Mylar, etc., in multiple thicknesses and widths; a transformer will always have several of those materials used within it.
“It’s a fine art, understanding differences of various transformer core materials and different winding designs/strategies, both on a scientific level and in [what we call] ‘Kung Fu mastery,'” Audio Note engineer Darko Greguras told me by email.
“The phono, filament, power board, and the PSU board are all point-to-point wired in the Meishu Tonmeister,” Greguras added. “This technique allows us to control the board material (FR4, Tufnol, Permali), the thickness of the board material—copper or silver—which can be from 0.5mm to 1.2mm. We achieve solid electrical connection by twisting a wire around resistor or capacitor leads and valve bases so a board can even work without a solder. Then the components are soldered in position. We use printed circuit boards in our amplifiers up to [but not including] level 3, because it is definitely much easier to populate them; but even then, we pay special attention to a copper thickness, FR4 board thickness, and the width of the traces.” This Meishu Phono 300B Tonmeister is a level three component, with no printed circuit boards.
“The standard Meishu Tonmeister”—including this Phono version—”uses copper wire throughout,” Grove continued, “but everything in the Meishu is balanced and aligned with exactly the same care as it is in our silver-wired uber-products. We select gauge, configuration (stranded or solid core), insulation (for example, PVC, PTFE, silicone, polyurethane, silk) and supplier to provide dimensional freedom in voicing a given product.”
The Meishu Phono 300B Tonmeister uses several tubes to get its mojo working. Audio Note doesn’t make those. The input/ driver stage utilizes a Psvane Hifi Series 12AU7/ECC82 and a NOS Philips ECG 5687WB, which drives an interstage transformer. The output stage is powered by two Psvane 300B tubes. An Electro-Harmonix 5U4GB takes care of rectification. The phono stage uses Psvane Hifi Series 12AX7/ECC83 and either Sovtek/Electro Harmonix 6922s or Russian ECC88s. Grove laid out the topology. These are common tube types, making tube-rolling easy and rewarding.
“In –> Volume control > Input valve –> RC coupling –> Driver valve –> Transformer –> Output valve –> Transformer –> Out,” he wrote. “The input valve is to provide a bit more gain so that the input signal can be line-level. RC coupling is used here because we don’t need a lot of voltage swing and because it allows some flexibility to shape the tone and bandwidth of the system and to avoid cascaded stages of similar nature—which is another advantage of using transformer coupling; it’s kind of like amplifier-stage genetic diversity. Next is the transformer-coupled stage, then the output valve and output transformer, which is common to most amps of this type.”
Greguras then described the Meishu Phono 300B’s tube-rectified moving magnet phono stage, which I used extensively in my listening.
“We call our ECC83 and ECC88 phono stage a classic with good reason,” Greguras wrote. “It’s single-ended with no feedback. … It has the best sonic blend of the ECC83 and ECC88, both in anode followers, with RIAA correction between the stages, optimally biased for a good dynamic transfer, yet sweet transients.
“In the M1 phono preamp, Oto and Soro integrated amplifiers,” Greguras continued, “the [power supply] is based on solid state diodes. But … the Meishu Phono 300B Tonmeister benefits from valve rectification and chokes.” Those chokes, too, are made in-house. “This means less mechanical sound, closer to real life, and richer harmonics.”
The parts in this model are upgraded, from metal-film Beyschlag resistors, standard electrolytic capacitors, and Audio Note tin caps to “a mix of 0.5 and 1W Audio Note tantalum film resistors, Audio Note Standard and KAISEI Electrolytic capacitors, [and] an Audio Note copper coupling capacitor. As we move up on the ladder of parts, there is less sound of its own.”
I asked Qvortrup about the manufacturing philosophy behind Audio Note products.
“We strive for our equipment to have no sound at all but the sound of the recording itself,” he continued. “We use an evaluation method we call ‘comparison by contrast.’ When we audition new equipment, we do not use known recordings. We pick five or ten recordings at random, listen to each of them, and then make a judgment as to whether one or the other piece of equipment individualizes the sound of each recording, and the one that does can then be considered to add/subtract the least from the recording.”
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COMPANY INFO
Audio Note Ltd.
Viscount House, Units C, D & E, Star Rd.
Star Trading Estate, Partridge Green, West Sussex RH13 8RA
United Kingdom
info@audionote.co.uk
+44 (0)1273 830 800
audionote.co.uk
ARTICLE CONTENTS
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Specifications
Associated Equipment
Measurements
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