Ok, sold the Scout. So turntables are done. For my final adventures in used gear, playing around with amps. I picked up a Decware Mini Torii on eBay.
I've been interested in Decware since the friend who first got me into hi-fi talked about them with a gleam in his eye. I know that the cult around this brand can get a bit Kool-Aidey, but a small-footprint, all-tube amp is something that, like a lot of us, I at least wanted to try. The seller threw in a second set of tubes and aftermarket power cord. I was kind of apprehensive in getting it, since I liked the Rogue Sphinx and had just done some tube rolling with its pair of 12au7s and the 6922s on my Budgie phono pre to get a sound I really liked - clear but muscular. But these don't come up used very often, so I thought I'd roll the dice.
So far the Decware sounds great. The Mini Torii is 5wpc, but the low wattage isn’t a problem at all on the Yamahas. I was listening to a vinyl copy of Funkadelic’s “Uncle Jam Wants You” at a louder volume than normal (hey, the wife’s not home) and the volume knobs are only at the 9 o'clock position. The sound is as muscular as the Sphinx but has quite a bit more air and separation. This album always sounded congested on earlier systems but now sounds nice and properly spaced out, in all the ways that term connotes. The soundstage is great, almost freakishly so. It extracts maybe a little more detail than the Sphinx but not so much more to bowl me over on that account. The bass, if anything, may be a little bit better on the MT - a bit more bounce to it.
There are a few PITAs included. It’s a dual mono set up, meaning every control switch/knob comes in pairs. So it’s fiddly. There are seven separate switches - two for power, two for inputs, two for headphone on/off, one for a tone control kill. Then there's two knobs to change feedback levels, two volume knobs and one tone control knob. Decware offers several knob choices, but the previous owner chose the brass ones that don’t have dots or dashes, meaning that everything has to be tuned by ear (I put tiny dots made of electrical tape on the volume knobs so I could at least make sure both outputs were at equal levels). Meanwhile, none of the switches or knobs are labeled, meaning it’s not exactly user-friendly. I know I’ll have to show my wife a couple of times how to work this when she wants to listen to the radio - which switches turn it on, which change the inputs, and which are the volume controls. And also that she’ll need to flip the switches on BOTH sides.
Also, with 10 tubes total on this thing, it gets warm. And with only two inputs, I either have to make/shell out for a switching box to go between tuner and DAC or change the RCAs manually.
The whole thing has a smaller footprint than the Sphinx but is hefty. Still, I kind of like the Sphinx’s plain ruggedness, at least in a house with two little kids running around. They knew how to turn that amp on (one push button) and how to change volume/ inputs at papa’s command. This one will be a little more of a learning curve. Still a little curious about a Decware Super Zen Triode, which have an even lower wattage but also seem a little more straightfoward in the UX.