Last week (last Saturday, 26 May 2007), Indonesian audio DIY community held a blind test session. The blind test was held at Rich Audio, ITC Permata Hijau. This time, the subject was Single Ended Amplifier. All were DIY products (except the SAC, made in Thailand). We have 12 contenders this time, divided into 2 classes, small power (less than 5 Watts RMS) and high power (over 5 Watts RMS).

Here’s the contenders.

The other equipments used were:

  • Spark CDT15 CD Player (fully modified, op-amp is running in Class A)
  • Sonic Frontier SFL-1 Signature Series (also fully modified)
  • DIY Speaker with D25 tweeter and Vifa P17 woofer in Transmission Line cabinet (MTM)
  • CDP to Pre-amp Interconnect: Oritek X2
  • Pre-amp to Amplifier Interconnect: Unsemble Ultraflex
  • Speaker Cable: Kimber 8VS

Below is the photo of systems used. We also tried another speaker (Vifa XT25 tweeter and MG18 woofer in Transmission Line cabinet), but it was simply too heavy for the contenders. So we decided to use the MTM Transmission line (D25 tweeter and Vifa P17 woofer). The dual woofer simply raised the sensitivity around 3dB to over 90 dB. So, should be lighter for those contenders. We used black cover to prevent the judges and audiences to see what we were playing. The operator (me and friends) would play each amplifier and the judge wrote down the score for each amplifier played.

We used a laptop to enter the score given by the judge. You can download the score sheet here.

Picture below shows the judges and audiences listening each amplifier carefully.

The songs:

  1. Ingram Washington – What A Difference A Day Makes
  2. Take Five Dave Brubeck Quartet Time Out – Three to Get Ready

Final result:
You can download the final result here (in Excel format).

1st Session:

  1. EL34 Triode 6W SAC Thailand (Mr. Arif Hidayat). Highest total score and Absolute winner in Demo Song #1 and #2.
  2. T22 (Mr. Coniz)
  3. 2E22 (Mr. Rocky)
  4. 300B (?)
  5. EL34 (Mr. Budi)
  6. 300B (Mr. Rudy, failed to finish the benchmark, one channel died)

2nd Session:

  1. Gondeng E55L (Mr. Alvin). Winner in Demo Song #1 (highest total score).
  2. Rich Audio EL34duo (Mr. Alex). Winner in Demo Song #2.
  3. Sun Audio Clone 2A3-6H8C (Mr. Ika)
  4. Why Not 6883-6DJ8 (Mr. Coniz)
  5. Gondeng 6C41C-6SN7 (Mr. Apin)
  6. 5B255-E182CC (?)