Posted by Wayne Parham [ 65.69.120.160 ] on March 20, 2005 at 14:33:29:
This month's Great Plains Audio Club meeting was held at Akhilesh's house on March 19th at 2:00pm. Akhilesh made some excellent nachos and a great time was had by all.
In attendance was Akhilesh Bajaj, Jim Denton, Phil Wilson, Mark Margiotta and me, and we discussed plans for the upcoming Great Plains Audiofest.
The Zen Select doesn't provide as much power as the Image SE8, specifically, the difference is 2 watts compared with 10. But we set the volume the same and did not change volume settings throughout the evaluation period. Volume was set so that the Zen was nowhere near clipping.
Also, as you can see from the photo above, the room was large and extremely reflective, with no carpeting or anything else to absorb sounds. Clap once in the room and you could hear the slap decay for over a second, so the room was extremely live. But even though this tends to over-emphasize midrange and treble, the Zen still produced adequate bass. In fact, the Zen sounded really good.
But the Nelson Audio amp sounded better according to everyone there. It sounded more controlled, particularly in the bass, and surprisingly sounded better in the midrange too. Most people consider the midrange of the Zen to be its biggest strength, and it does sound nice there. But everyone just seemed to fall in love with the SE8, its good looks and its great sound. Both Akhilesh and Phil are Zen owners, so this is pretty strong praise.
I was impressed too. I needed to take this opportunity to hear the amp connected properly, driven directly from the source. I hadn't taken the time to do that, and had hastily connected it to a preamp with the SE8's volume knob turned all the way up, which tends to make it more noisy. So I was eager to hear it connected as intended, and found it to be very nice sounding and pleasantly free of hum that way.
I'd give it a thumbs up for sure. I'll be sure to bring it to the Great Plains Audiofest so you can listen to it and decide for yourself.
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