First listen: Air Tight ATM2

[antipop]

This saturday I had a lunch near my audio dealer so I took the opportunity to stop by to say hello.

I took a look at what was playing in the auditorium and he was finishing a session with a customer. The system was composed of an Accuphase DP550+Aurender as source and preamp, Air Tight ATM2 and a pair of Magnepan 1.7.

I've been lusting after the Air Tight when I first saw them. They are one of the most beautiful amp I've encountered. So I took the opportunity to sit down and have a go at them.

Since I knew the guy pretty well, he said let's make it memorable. We replaced the Magnepan with a pair of Amati Futura, added the C2820 for preamp and put the DP700 as source.

From the first few notes, I was impressed by the system. Two things stroke me immediately, the sound stage and the bass. The precision in soundstage was perfect, you could pinpoint with great accuracy where each instrument was coming from. The bass was simply impeccable, it was sharp and well delineated.

We played Ahmad Jamal The Line from his latest album and I was stroke by the bass section. I listened to it before but I was never so amazed by the bass.

It went on for nearly 3 hours ! I wanted to end things on a high note so we played what may be my favorite track : Love for Sale played by Chet Baker on his live album Chet's Choice. I must have listened to this track over a 100 times. There is not much bass nor voices so it felt close to what I hear at home EXCEPT for soundstage and instrument separation. I was able to pinpoint where everyone was and I could Chet being between the center and right speaker, guitar to the left and bass somewhere between the left and center.

We ended with Bach: Toccata And Fugue In D Minor which is the same as I've heard at Ivan's. I was impressed again by the cleanliness of the sound and the precision. Though I didn't feel the same punch in the gut as the one I had with the Aida. Ivan system has a sense of power you can only get when you get into the very high end.

What started as a simple 15 minutes hello turned into a memorable session of almost 3 hours. At the end, I was happy to be cash strapped or it would have been very expensive.

Have you had any experience with Air Tight ? How would you compared it to other brands ?

PS: he had a pair a A200 sitting there, ready to play but I was so taken by the ATM2 that I didn't even ask him to power them up.