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In the Kondo lineup for instance, the Neiro, the Kegon, and the Gakuohs each have their own individual qualities and validity - but each is subtly different. Their perspective and view of the musical universe they inhabit are quite distinct from model to model despite these common Kondo qualities. The Neiro has a spiritual and ethereal leaning, the Kegon a lusty voluptuous, passionate affair-like quality while the Gakuohs are like looking from a high mountain peak on a clear and beautiful day and you can sit back and survey the whole of creation before you. Each Kondo model has a different take on the musical world but somehow the essence of the experience has an uncanny integrity to it. Given a good system and efficient speakers, I'd love to be in the position to change flavors from week to week or month to month and it's easy to see why there are quite a number of Kondo owners who have more than one of these amplifiers. I'm not saying each of these amplifiers isn't complete in its own right, but their different outlooks and moods are amazing to experience and if I hit all the lottery numbers, I'd be very tempted to go that way myself. However, so far the numbers haven't come in so I've had to choose one. And I've chosen the Gakuoh push pull. I've chosen it because I got sucked down its particular worm hole, which is one I'm comfortable to inhabit for the rest of forever.


Resistors, capacitors, inductors, output transformers, the chassis, every component the amplifier is made of has an individual mechanical characteristic and as a whole those elements give the amplifier a mechanical signature which has a significant impact on the sound we hear. This is one reason why all Kondo amplifiers are made of copper: chassis, sub chassis, output transformer encapsulations - all fabricated in copper. The characteristics of copper have what Kondo wanted and what he described as giving the sound a supple, lithe and elastic quality that you do not get from amplifiers made of stainless steel, mild steel, aluminium, acrylic or wood. This was important for Kondo. He had an extremely holistic view. He was also far from dogmatic about paper specifications. For instance, he'd look at various output transformer core materials and consider their relative hysteresis or permittivity characteristics but only chose based on their performance with music programs. He would choose the materials and techniques that gave the most human quality to the sound. He would neither rule in or out options based on what the scientific establishment considered 'correct'. He was his own man. He would make his own choices by judging them with his own musical sensibility . The man and now the company that designs and develops these amplifiers did and do so based on end results. Yes there is well-grounded science but ultimately the product is an artist's creation.


The Kondo Sound
The Gakuohs have been a revelation for me. Apart from the music-centered quality of the listening experience, the fabric of the sound itself is really magnificent and time should be spent to appreciate it. They have given me an unparalleled range of musical experience and delivered a type of sound I've not come across before. It's particularly noticeable when you first turn the things on. I get this visceral, physical sense of pleasure that's not a million miles away from a drug or the release you get from that first glass of wine. It's odd and it works pretty much every time. Better still, the music seeps its way into the depths and like a hot bath or a sauna, I'm able to give way, release, relax and get into it in a way that is a lot more pleasurable and powerful than I'd expect, and a lot more nourishing to the parts of one's innards or soul that music feeds so well.


The characteristic Kondo sound is hard to verbalize but there is a gracious power that reminds me not of baths but of oceans. There is no tightening and constraint as music expands and contracts. There is no sense that it is being constrained or contained. Instead there is a freedom to expand with effortless reach, the easy rise to crescendo, and the massless slide into diminuendo, like a huge ocean wave or swell with its enormous, calm, silent power. In most systems dynamics like this sound squeezed tight, a tad like a digital 'step by step', a quite unnatural experience but with the Gakuohs the great swell bodily lifts you up and lets you down with astonishing yet delicate power.
It seems to me that in music, tonality has constituent parts. There is a temperature, there are textures, there are colors. This is all part of what we call timbre, something which is capable of communicating a quite remarkable range of moods and atmospheres. You get composers who just loved exploring sonority like Mahler, Pärt and Debussy, people who paint remarkable mood landscapes by blending all the endless permutations that these different tonalities and timbres permit. There are many hifis where the qualities of tonality are lost, where the sound is overly warm or overly cool or distinctly monochrome or everything is distant and grey or forward and etched. The effect of these faults on all music is a loss but on some it's really catastrophic. Beauty of tone, when you have heard it, is a wonderful thing.


Kondo amplifiers convey instrument timbres with a surprisingly natural feel. If there is a tonality which is luminous, radiant and glossy, they will produce it that way. So often I hear a system and there's is an inability to capture the inner radiance, luminescence and translucence of tone. The music is seriously diminished as a result. To have the full spectrum of colors that are there in the original performance, to be able to hear into the tone and through it and behind it without a sense of plain mass, to feel its vibrant energy - this is what makes for a completely immersive, transformative musical experience.
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A particular challenge for any hifi system is to convey the sound of massed instrumentation. Strongly contrasting textures and colors and characteristics can become a dense mass of illegibility. What we want for example is to be able to clearly hear the untainted, drab, noble tone of a clarinet while at the same time hear the brilliant radiant rendering of a defiant trumpet over it and the lovely melting sheets of sound you get out of a flute, capturing these differences without artificially bleeding them into each other and homogenizing the whole. With the Gakuohs, each element is clearly and distinctly uncontaminated. Most amplifiers have the unfortunate quality of stamping their character on sound. For example, 300B amplifiers have a reputation for being warm, cloying and a bit cuddly. But not so the Gakuoh. In Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel or in Schubert's Winterreise [Onyx 4010], there is nothing warm or sweet in the performance. On the contrary. The Gakuohs deliver the chilling minor-key temperature and texture of the original, from the perfect mirror finish of a cold still lake to the fractured opaqueness of a frozen brook. However, ask them to do a rich and burnished cello and you don't need a fireplace.