Tube Maze

5 Stars4 Stars3 Stars2 Stars1 Star (4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

There’s a certain kind of amplifier that walks into your listening room, shakes your hand, says all the right things and leaves no fingerprints. You listen for a week, you nod politely, you smile at it the way you’d smile at a stranger at a bar. Pleasant company, nice conversation, and gone from memory before the coffee finishes brewing the next morning. I’ve reviewed plenty of those. The Kenwood L-07M is not one of them.

5 Stars4 Stars3 Stars2 Stars1 Star (2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

Let’s get the unpleasant part out of the way first: the New York Audio Labs Moscode 600 is not a pretty amplifier. It looks like something bolted into a 1980s broadcast truck, or standing guard in the boiler room of a Brooklyn walk-up. A perforated metal cage hides the tubes, a fan hums along whether you need it or not, and the whole thing has the industrial charm of a toaster oven designed by a committee of electricians. If you buy hi-fi to impress the neighbors, keep walking. If you buy it to be moved by music, pull up a chair, because that ugly cage is hiding something beautiful.

5 Stars4 Stars3 Stars2 Stars1 Star (1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

When an amplifier arrives on my bench with one channel’s fuses not blown but gone, I don’t reach for music. I reach for the variac, the dim-bulb tester and a strong cup of coffee. A missing fuse is the audio equivalent of a used car with black tape over the check-engine light. Somebody knew something and decided you didn’t need to. So before I tell you how the Bedini 150/150 Mk II sounds, let me tell you that it very nearly didn’t get the chance.