As most of you know, I’m a tube guy at heart—particularly when it comes to preamps. But if I were in the market for the state of the art in analog, I’d make a big exception for the solid-state Soulution 750 phonostage. Yeah, at $25k it costs a lot of dough and, yeah, it doesn’t have all the bloominess and dimensionality of a great tube unit (although stay tuned for the good news on this subject). What it does have—what all of Soulution’s products have—is the lowest noise and highest transparency to sources of any electronics I’ve yet reviewed. In spite of its neutrality and high resolution, it is also, like its companion pieces (the 700/710 amplifiers and the 720/721 linestage preamplifiers, reviewed by me in Issue 199), an extremely gemütlich component—not too lean and not too fat, not too dark and not too light, not too cool and not too hot. Like Baby’s porridge (and all other Soulution electronics), in tonal balance and dynamic range and scale it is “just right.”

You won’t have to be a golden ear to judge the results. Critical little performance details that are hard or (occasionally) impossible to hear through even the finest competing phono preamps—such as the faint touch of tremolo, here a literal expression of vulnerability, that Alison Krauss adds to select lyrics in her sad song of busted romance, “Ghost in the House”—are as clear as day through the 750. Ditto for staging details—such as the way the extra battery of trumpet players (all nine of them) and other augmenting brass instruments have been situated on tiers of risers at the far right of the stage in the Denon recording of Janácek’s Sinfonietta. And double-ditto for mastering details, such as the dubbing in of Joni Mitchell’s voice as she sings multiple backup to her own lead on “Carey” from Blue.

The constant thumping of the una corda pedal on Diana Krall’s thoughtfully expressive version of “A Case of You” (for more on which, see my Oracle Delphi review), the traffic noises outside Walthamstow Hall on Dorati and the LSO’s bang-up performance of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces, the way Sinatra adds a surge of extra energy to the lyric “What’s new?” at the close of his great rendition of the song of the same name, using this added volume and vigor to project a false confidence (like a guy trying not to reveal his heartbreak and helplessness), before his voice finally collapses into a revelatory whisper of despair on “I still love you so” and the bravado is given up…the Soulution 750 brings you all of these things, and does it from top to bottom (its grip, pace, and body in the bass are truly exemplary), on every track you listen to. Best of all, it does this magic trick without the usual sacrifices that electronics designers make to increase transparency. Here there is no desaturation of tone color (no overripening of it, either), no lower-midrange suckout, no added zip in the upper midrange. It’s extraordinary to come across products that manage to be this detailed and transparent without giving up some natural density of timbre at some place in the frequency spectrum.

My conclusion? The Soulution 750 is the most neutral, detailed, transparent-to-sources, lifelike solid-state phonostage I’ve yet heard. It will appeal to absolute sound listeners and fidelity-to-mastertape listeners equally. It is, in fact, what I would buy if I wanted the best, had the money, and weren’t buying a tube phonostage.

Link do recenzji: Soulution 750 – The Absolute Sound