Ayon Spirit Integrated Amplifier – Also works as a Stereo Amp!

Pure Class A 65+65 Watts RMS

O% Financing Available !!

$3000 – New Tubes – Fully Serviced! – Gorgeous Trade-In!

All of Ayon
Audio’s products are painstakingly designed and assembled in-house; the
company even makes their own tubes. While they specialize in
low-powered, single-ended designs, the Spirit integrated is the
company’s ostensible attempt to craft a more mainstream offering:
switchable between push-pull pentode and triode operation, the Spirit
pumps out a robust 60-watts per channel in pentode and 40-watts in
triode. With a list price of $4500, the Spirit and the similar,
triode-only Spark integrated, are Ayon’s twin entry-level offerings.

Entry-level
it may be, but the Spirit is still a gorgeously built amp. Having it in
your listening room will instantly identify you as someone who is quite
serious indeed about their music playback. Looking at the photograph on
the Ayon website before actually receiving the amp, I completely
misjudged the Spirit’s scale, thinking it much smaller than it actually
is. So I was surprised to see the FedEx guy standing on my sidewalk a
week or two later, laboring to pull an enormous, and enormously heavy,
box up my front steps on his cart. He placed the box at my feet and
fled, clearly wanting no part of getting the package up to my
second-floor apartment. With considerable effort I did it
myself—something I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to any of you out
there.

I let the
ice-cold block (this was early April in Boston) sit for 24 hours in my
apartment to get to room temperature, and the next night I unpacked the
85-pound beast—19 inches wide, about 14 inches in depth, and more than
10 inches in height, with transformer towers the size of quart paint
cans. Build quality in general is impeccable, and design features
(brushed aluminum casework, chrome transformers) are of uniformly high
quality.

The Spirit
uses four KT88 and three 12AU7 tubes. It is a zero negative feedback
design and runs in pure Class A. The preamp section has four line levels
and there are speaker taps for both 4-ohm and 8-ohm impedances.  I
found the 8-ohm setting to be the correct one for both my Harbeth 7-ES
monitors and Spendor 3/1P mini-monitors. 

Though an
integrated, the Spirit occupies a spot on the audiophile spectrum where
convenience features give way to more purist priorities. The small,
chunky remote—brushed aluminum to match the amplifier’s finish—controls
volume and muting only.  There are no non-essential front panel buttons
of any kind: no balance control, no tone controls, and no mono button.
The amp not only has fully manual tube biasing, but has located this
important feature on the back panel. The power switch is also
located in the back. This may be wise given the damage that could occur
if the amp was accidentally turned off in use, but is hardly convenient
given that most owners will switch the amp on and off frequently to
preserve tube life. Given its height, weight, and the need for easy
back-panel access, the Spirit seems designed with the assumption that it
will be placed either on top of a rack or on a dedicated stand.   

So the
Spirit may not rate high in convenience, but with performance like this,
I very quickly forgave and forgot. All things considered, this is the
best amplifier I’ve had in my system. Until now that distinction
belonged to my reference amp, the Coda Unison (also a circa-$4K
integrated), which had easily bested all competition over the past four
years—and there had been a number of challengers. While I would score
the Unison and Spirit very similarly on an absolute scale—the
solid-state Unison is better in some areas, the Spirit in others—the
ways in which the Spirit is superior are the most important ones for me
in terms of musical enjoyment.

The Spirit really—and I mean really—distinguishes
itself in terms of tone, depth, and micro-dynamics.  Instruments just
had a palpable presence and dimensionality. Virgin Classical’s CD of
Truls Mørk playing the Bach ‘cello suites provided a perfect
illustration of the Spirit’s strengths: the weight and woody resonance
of Mørk’s instrument came through in startling fashion, while the subtle
nuances of his performance, the small-scale dynamic gradations that
make music-making a living, breathing entity, were extraordinary.  

One of my
desert island albums is Blue Note’s three-disc collection of pianist
Herbie Nichols’ complete recordings for the label (also available as a
Mosaic LP set in the ’80s).  Nichols was an indelible composer and
musician, both soulful and cerebral at the same time, and this music is
some of the most beautiful, cliché-free jazz you will hear. I have been
listening to these trio recordings—in very good mid-fifties mono—for
years, but hearing them through the Spirit really did bring me closer
than I’ve ever felt before: the piano tone was supple, the subtleties of
Nichols’ touch came through beautifully, and the whole sound picture
had incredible depth and intimacy. Tone, depth, dynamics—my Unison is no
slouch on any of these fronts, but the Spirit was something special.

The
important thing to clarify at this point is that although these are
areas where tube amps can sometimes impress by rendering the music in a
pleasingly plummy fashion, the Spirit’s sound was not exaggeratedly rich
or euphonic. That ‘cello sounded deep, warm and woody on the Bach CD,
but it also had plenty of bite, with well-defined transients that a
tilted-down treble would tend to smooth over. Yes, the Spirit does have a
slightly darker balance than the solid-state Unison, but my net
impression is that the Spirit makes the Unison sound a bit cooler and
more clinical than the real thing, rather than the Unison making the
Spirit sound too warm. 

For me, the
Spirit managed to retain all of the typical strengths of tube
amplification while avoiding most of the pitfalls. Although amps of this
type often specialize in small-scale acoustic music, I found the Spirit
to be an excellent all-rounder. It was able to communicate the scale of
a large orchestra, and also did surprisingly well with rock ‘n roll—it
didn’t soften and dull the edges of electric guitars the way some tube
amps do.  It’s probably not a first choice for headbangers, but on LPs
like R.E.M.’s new Accelerate, the Spirit captured the crunch of Peter Buck’s guitar parts with visceral impact, and on Elvis Costello’s latest, Momofuku (again, on vinyl), the raw, live-in-the-studio vibe was captured to a tee. 

The Spirit
and my E.A.R. phono preamp were very happy partners, but the amp and my
new digital reference, the Bel Canto PL-2 universal player, were a match
made in heaven. The Bel Canto is a big step up from my previous player,
the (unmodded) Sony DVP-NS999ES, a unit which also played CD, SACD and
DVD (but not DVD-A, which the Bel Canto does support). The PL-2 has a
deep, detailed, involving sound, and is the first CD player I’ve owned
that does not induce the fatigue factor that occurs so often after an
hour (or less) of digital listening. About the only tiny fault I’ve
found—at least through my reference amp—is a slight dryness that removes
just a bit of the “air” from certain recordings. 

When teamed
with the Spirit, though, this sense of additive dryness almost
completely disappeared—that is, recordings simply sounded dry or “wet”
according to the source. Whether the recording was of a live performance
in a natural acoustic (the church venue of the Bach ‘cello suites CD
was instantly identifiable) or a layered, studio production like Beck’s
folky Sea Change (reasonably warm but dry as a bone), the Spirit conveyed the ambience of each CD or LP with impressive versatility and range. 

The Spirit
also did well with the hi-rez digital formats. I’ve auditioned a couple
of warmish amps lately (one tube and one solid-state) whose chaste top
end performance essentially negated the extended dynamic and frequency
range that the SACD and DVD-A formats deliver. That was not the case
here. To give just one example, the recent Living Stereo SACD of Jascha
Heifetz playing the Sibelius violin concerto was absolutely stunning.
This is a well-known audiophile classic, but I’ve never heard it sound
so beautiful, so powerful, so majestic. Some of the Living
Stereo SACDs have been criticized for being a little leaner than
previous issues of the same performances, but through the Spirit, this
particular remastering (and others, like the Reiner/CSO Scheherazade and the Munch/BSO Daphnis and Chloe) sounded perfectly judged.

Most of my
initial listening was done (and all of the above observations were made)
in pentode mode. This was a purposeful strategy. Just about every
review I’ve read of a switchable tube amp seems to conclude that the
triode setting simply smokes the push-pull pentode mode. And as a
company, Ayon is very much associated with its triode designs. So I
wanted to get a baseline on the amp via pentode and then see if triode
kicked it up to a whole new level. The fact that I found the sound in
pentode to be very, very good set that baseline pretty darn high. 

Switching
to triode revealed that this form of amplification does have something
uniquely magical about it. The first track of jazz lion Charles Lloyd’s
wonderful new CD, Rabo de Nube, features Lloyd playing
saxophone, initially accompanied only by percussionist Eric Harland, who
occupies the rear left-center of the stage switching between several
different shaker instruments. Through pentode mode, it sounded superb,
but in triode it was uncanny: the reach-out-and-touch-it quality
of both Lloyd’s saxophone and, especially, of Harland’s percussion was
incredible—the most strikingly real reproduction I’ve heard in my home.

This
“uncanny” experience was repeated with several subsequent recordings.
The Tokyo Quartet’s recent double-CD of the early Beethoven string
quartets on Harmonia Mundi is another state-of-the-art recording, but
through the Spirit’s pentode mode it has just a bit of digital
edge—still first-class, but a little toward the bright side of neutral.
In triode, though, it’s another miracle: the quartet is right there in
front of me, with proper scale, gorgeous tone and three-dimensionality.  

Those two
recordings, and numerous other small-ensemble acoustic offerings, made
clear the Spirit’s superior mid-range purity when in triode operation.
But at least with my average-efficiency Harbeth and Spendor speakers,
triode function did have its limitations. That Heifetz/Sibelius disc,
which sounded so majestic in pentode, was less so in triode; and rock
music in general lost too much testosterone. It didn’t sound like the
amp was running out of watts—climaxes in the Sibelius and other
orchestral recordings held together just fine—but musical power,
authority and bass foundation suffered in these larger-scale (or, as the
case may be, simply louder) works. So while the most spine-tingling
moments I spent with the Spirit came courtesy of its triode mode, it was
not a slam-dunk winner to the point where I’d listen to it exclusively;
I appreciated having both options to choose from. 

After 12 or
so years of engaging in this hobby in earnest, I have reached a point
where my system components all fall within a range that might be called
“the serious but sensible audiophile.” My Harbeth speakers currently
retail for $3500; my Coda integrated is about $4K, as is my Nottingham
turntable/Grado cartridge combo; and my Bel Canto digital player, the
now-discontinued PL-2, originally retailed for $5K. 

I point
this out only because I think it’s important for readers to know the
perspective that a reviewer brings to his/her job. I am not a mega-buck
reviewer. Some audio writers who have a continual stream of high-end
products in their living rooms—and more power to them—can sound a bit
blasé when faced with a less-than-super-luxe item. That’s inevitable and
understandable, but as a reader, I often find myself trying to handicap
their somewhat tempered impressions against what my own might be. The
Ayon Audio Spirit integrated, at $4500, is right in the range with which
I’m most familiar. And I’ve auditioned quite a few products in that
range that I liked and/or respected, but that just didn’t thrill me. But
for $4500, I want and expect something to thrill me. 

Well, the
Ayon Audio Spirit integrated thrilled me. It is beautifully built and
beautifully engineered, and while I often find tube amps to be jazz and
classical specialists – and not particularly strong with rock or other
types of popular music—I found the Spirit convincing with just about
everything I threw at it (with pentode operation being better for rock
and large-scale classical, and triode best for smaller, acoustic
ensembles). It is, on balance, the finest amplifier I’ve heard in my
system, and will now join the Audience adeptResponse power conditioner
as one of the two components I’ve found hardest to return to its
distributor.

Spirit integrated amplifier

Retail: $4500

U.S. Distributor

Ayon Audio USA

8390 E. Via De Ventura

F110-194

Scottsdale, AZ 85258

TEL: 800-676-1085 Ext 2

e-mail: [email protected]

web address: www.ayonaudio.com

Specifications

 

Amplifier
Ayon Spirit

Class of Operation
Triode or Pentode mode, Class-A

Tube Complement
KT-88

Load Impedance
8 Ohms

Bandwidth
12Hz – 60kHz

Output Power-Pentode mode
2 x 65 W

Output Power-Triode mode
2 x 40W

Input sensitivity for full power
500mV

Input Impedance at 1 kHz
100 KΩ

NFB
0dB

Easy Bias
Manual Easy Bias

Remote Control
Yes

Inputs
4x Line In, 1 x Direct In Stereo Amp

Output
1 x Pre out Subwoofer

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