Hi. I am curious about the integrated amplifiers of Soulnote. There is no local dealer where I live so I would like to get an idea as to how they sound. To those who have heard or own/ed any of their integrated amplifiers, can you kindly describe their sound? Are they on the smooth and warm camp or neutral and detailed? How about their driving capabilities? Can they drive medium sensitive speakers? Any inputs will be much appreciated. Many thanks in advance!
Soulnote Integrated Amplifiers
- Thread starter Boggy
- Start date
I've been wanting more
I've really wanted to hear the P3 preamp, or the A3 integrated. I've heard some very positive things from some of the people at YG who used it in the main listening room there.
Well, i wrote about it on other forum, so pasting it in here:
No idea about higher end like A3, would love to hear it one day.. One polish reviever who made a test about it(and also testes A2) thinks it is better in than my A2 in basically all parametres..
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I can vouch for soulnote, since i own A2 SE. For my taste:
-i listen lot of badly recorded music (like8 0's italian progressive rock), so i want a gear that can sound great on good recordings, and also good on bad recordings. Showing their faults, but doing it smooth way so you can concentrate on music.
Soul note tonality is on A2 a slight side of warmth, it is smooth sounding and open & dynamic. I wanted it to have even more organic presentation, so i pared it with luxman cl38uc tube pre, and have been very happy with this combination.
Best part in soul Note is, that it has tube like flow and organic tone. (even more with tube pre)
I have wavac 300b, and i think they both have very similar "taste" and flow, so the short signal path & no negative feedback work here.
To give comparisons: personally i do not like moderrn accuphase gear, i would say they are bit of opposite from tonality of soundnote. (I have heard up to e5000, though not on same system) and i always get feeling when. have in my mind the feeling of organic flow from wavac & soulnote, that accuphase gear is very mechanical, tight, gray sounding. YMMV, but just reporting my listening experiences.
No idea about higher end like A3, would love to hear it one day.. One polish reviever who made a test about it(and also testes A2) thinks it is better in than my A2 in basically all parametres..
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I can vouch for soulnote, since i own A2 SE. For my taste:
-i listen lot of badly recorded music (like8 0's italian progressive rock), so i want a gear that can sound great on good recordings, and also good on bad recordings. Showing their faults, but doing it smooth way so you can concentrate on music.
Soul note tonality is on A2 a slight side of warmth, it is smooth sounding and open & dynamic. I wanted it to have even more organic presentation, so i pared it with luxman cl38uc tube pre, and have been very happy with this combination.
Best part in soul Note is, that it has tube like flow and organic tone. (even more with tube pre)
I have wavac 300b, and i think they both have very similar "taste" and flow, so the short signal path & no negative feedback work here.
To give comparisons: personally i do not like moderrn accuphase gear, i would say they are bit of opposite from tonality of soundnote. (I have heard up to e5000, though not on same system) and i always get feeling when. have in my mind the feeling of organic flow from wavac & soulnote, that accuphase gear is very mechanical, tight, gray sounding. YMMV, but just reporting my listening experiences.
Well, yes and no.
I have talked with reviewer who had both A3 and A2, he seems to think that A3 is quite step up, but show conditions that i attended did not really show this..
I will soon go and compare A3 vs A2 at dealer, but until then:
They were up to show in Helsinki Highend exhibition that i was at the weekend. Problem was quite bad rooms, and they had not too well optimized the systems.
The guys who were showing had too much weird filtering going on and lost qualities that i know soul note has.
The much simpler and cheaper system with A2 was much better in those conditions.
(The speakers we 10 times cheaper and sound was much better..)
So bad conditions, unable to have yet any conclusions.
I have talked with reviewer who had both A3 and A2, he seems to think that A3 is quite step up, but show conditions that i attended did not really show this..
I will soon go and compare A3 vs A2 at dealer, but until then:
They were up to show in Helsinki Highend exhibition that i was at the weekend. Problem was quite bad rooms, and they had not too well optimized the systems.
The guys who were showing had too much weird filtering going on and lost qualities that i know soul note has.
The much simpler and cheaper system with A2 was much better in those conditions.
(The speakers we 10 times cheaper and sound was much better..)
So bad conditions, unable to have yet any conclusions.
Attachments
Not sure if you're in US or elsewhere but Soulnote dealer in my area has a demo A2 for $4400, indicating retail price is $8000. Not sure a post like this is forum acceptable, so would need some moderator guidance before posting the link. FYI, I've never talked to this dealer nor are affiliated with them
Soulnote A-2/3 Review
This is going to be more of a journey through my recent amplifiers and why I sought out the Soulnote amplifiers in the first place. I don't have oodles of experience with high end amplifiers, this is just my own journey.
I got back into speakers in late 2020 during Covid. I had just moved to Austin TX to take a job full-time here. I was in an apartment but I got some cheap Acoustic Zen Adagio’s from a guy locally off Facebook marketplace to see if I could do speakers in my apartment instead of just the headphones I had been stuck using for much of the previous decade. After I got them I borrowed a Pass Labs int-25 from a friend here in Austin and figured out I just didn’t care for the sound of Pass Labs gear, I thought the amp sounded dead, and instead of using it, I used an underpowered 2a3 headphone amplifier from Eddie current as the amp for my speakers for about a month.
This dislike of Pass Labs has lead me to have almost zero interest in other amplifiers using mosfets, preferring the sound of BJTs in my amps. My love for that Eddie Current Aficionado also led me to try some larger 845 tube amps with speakers, and at least for me, these higher power tubes lose the tube magic that you get from 45s or 2A3s. The magic of tubes for me isn’t in warmth or tone controls from tube rolling, it comes from the technical aspects the best tubes excel at, clarity, transient definition, staging, etc, and I think that clarity and transient definition suffers when you try to use higher powered tubes.
I briefly had a Benchmark AHB-2 which I also think is a good amp, specially when you consider its adorable size and heat output. It does separation and clarity very well, but stages very flat and has a dryness to the sound. After a great deal of research I decided to give Coda amplifiers a shot. Terry London’s reviews of the No8 and 16.0 as well as threads here at WBF were very influential. I bought the No8 and from the moment I plugged it in I knew it sounded right in a way the other amps I had tried did not. It did everything the AHB-2 did but sounded more real, had more depth, the rightness was present. By the following Monday I’d ordered the 16.0, I needed to hear what the best they could do was.
It took several months to be built and to get it and it improved slightly in almost every way versus the No8, I thought this would be my endgame amplifier. I had it for almost 3 years. I had also upgraded to the Acoustic Zen Crescendo Mk2 from my Adagio’s.
Fast forward to the middle of 2024, I bought the house I am currently in, a few months later I bought my Evolution Acoustics MM2 speakers. After several rounds of treatment to get my room sounding decent enough, one of the times I had my local group of audio buddies over, one of them brought along his Oliver Sayes 2A3 tube amplifier. My new MM2s were more sensitive and higher impedance than my previous Crescendo mk2s, and are somewhat known for being tube friendly, though maybe not 2A3’s.
This amp kind of blew a hole in my amplifier plans. It couldn’t power my speakers at the levels I listen, nor with the music I typically listen to, but with the right music at the right levels, the clarity, and particularly the lack of blur in the transients, once I heard it I couldn’t un-hear it on my own Coda 16.0 anymore. Sure it was most obvious on some particularly transient heavy metal, but once I heard it, it was easy to notice this blur on anything, even just stripped back female vocals with piano. At this point I wasn’t sure such a thing could even be achieved with solid state, but I had to start looking.
Now if we back up a few months to shortly after I bought the house, a friend had shown me this brand Soulnote, saying one of his friends said their top of the line M-3 monoblocks was one of the best amplifiers he had ever heard from the mids up, but the speakers he had used to testing them have an incredibly punishing load in the bass, but it seemed to me like with the correct speakers maybe they would sing. At the time I was already considering the MM2 speakers and was eventually think I would try out a soulnote amp. I also read the designer, Kato-san’s, philosophy page which is fascinating, and lead me to think maybe there was a chance that the Soulnote amplifier would have some of the clarity I wanted. They posit that all the paralleled transistors in most amplifiers cause a certain amount of blur to the sound, and this exactly what I was hearing in my Coda 16.0, which has many paralleled output devices, as most solid state amps do.
So I bought an A-2, and after it showed up I was blown away. This amp might not have had all of the transient clarity I was seeking from the 2A3 amp, but it had a lot of it. It also had a more spacious sound stage and the most surprising thing to me was how much better integrated the bass sounded into the music, I hadn’t really noticed the lack of integration with the 16.0 till I heard the A-2 fix it. I was sitting happy with the A-2, the locals were impressed with the improvements vs the 16.0. The one thing was that it has a slight sort of “excited” coloration. One of my friends called it a “jazz hands” presentation, which I think is an apt descriptor. This as I said is slight and with my main preference for music being metal, this didn’t bother me all that much.
The A-2 uses 4 paralleled output devices. The top of the line A-3 has no parallel devices, only using single complementary pairs of BJTs for each channel, I viewed this as the ultimate form of their vision for blur free audio amplification and was always curious. But I was also worried about only having one device, whether it would give me the precision I also seek from my amplifier, the grip over my speakers, specially for the metal I listen to. So I wasn’t in any rush to buy one without being able to try it first to ensure that 1 device wasn’t a step to far for me.
Then in February 2025 The Music Room listed an A-3 used for sale, so I decided to jump on it, knowing I could always send it back with their return policy if it didn’t work out.
The A-2 is just a taste of the Soulnote sound, a very good taste, and a well priced one, specially at current used prices, I can’t think of anything I’d rather have. But the A-3 takes everything the A-2 did and cranks it to 11, particularly in terms of refinement. The Jazz hands are gone. The blur free presentation I was used to is taken to an absurd level. In the first few days of owning the amp I would often find myself laughing at the way the amp was rendering things in music I had never heard before. The way certain bass lines were presented, the separation, absolutely nothing bluring together. Honestly, with some tracks the lack of blur in the music is almost overwhelming at first. You think you’ve heard these exceptionally complex pieces before, and think there’s a lot to unpack aurally, but even then much of it is being blurred together but you’ve never noticed. With the A-3 all of that blur is gone and the raw amount of information presented is frankly staggering.
Another sidebar. In addition to the attributes listed above about what tube amps excel at, another thing they excel at, and basically only they can do is what me and some of my friends locally and online refer to as the “small stuff”. This is the plankton, the micro dynamics, the micro detail, the real decay, all of those things that take something from sounding like a very good reproduction to sounding real.
Back to the A-3, that “small stuff” wasn’t something I thought I would find here, but not only does the A-3 bring the small stuff, I think in this regard it actually manages to beat tubes at their own game. I am not sure how or why, but Soulnote has seemingly cracked the code with solid state amplifiers, offering something that does everything I want from tubes, without any of the things I don’t want, the heat, the other attributes of tubes, warmth, goo, etc that many audiophiles seek from tubes, none of that is here, but if what you’re after is the absolute clarity of tubes, as well as the micro dynamics, plankton, etc the best tube amplifiers offer, the A-3 brings all of this in spades.
I do still believe, founded or not, that these amps require more careful pairing with speakers than many solid state amps. These aren’t like the Coda that can be plugged into anything and sound pretty good. But with the right speaker I think the A-3 is world class. I have had buddies enjoy the A-2 on speakers in the upper 80s of sensitivity, so maybe my caution is unfounded.
Also a word on warmup, the A-2 and A-3 in my experience both need about an hour. The A-2 will sound like it wants to cut your head off for the first hour. The A-3 however, doesn’t present that way while warming up, it just sounds like a mediocre version of itself.
A week after I got the amp I had my local audio buddies over to hear it, and one thing one of them said that night has stuck with me ever since, “Chase, there’s no reason to try to tell people how good this is, they won’t believe you”
This is going to be more of a journey through my recent amplifiers and why I sought out the Soulnote amplifiers in the first place. I don't have oodles of experience with high end amplifiers, this is just my own journey.
I got back into speakers in late 2020 during Covid. I had just moved to Austin TX to take a job full-time here. I was in an apartment but I got some cheap Acoustic Zen Adagio’s from a guy locally off Facebook marketplace to see if I could do speakers in my apartment instead of just the headphones I had been stuck using for much of the previous decade. After I got them I borrowed a Pass Labs int-25 from a friend here in Austin and figured out I just didn’t care for the sound of Pass Labs gear, I thought the amp sounded dead, and instead of using it, I used an underpowered 2a3 headphone amplifier from Eddie current as the amp for my speakers for about a month.
This dislike of Pass Labs has lead me to have almost zero interest in other amplifiers using mosfets, preferring the sound of BJTs in my amps. My love for that Eddie Current Aficionado also led me to try some larger 845 tube amps with speakers, and at least for me, these higher power tubes lose the tube magic that you get from 45s or 2A3s. The magic of tubes for me isn’t in warmth or tone controls from tube rolling, it comes from the technical aspects the best tubes excel at, clarity, transient definition, staging, etc, and I think that clarity and transient definition suffers when you try to use higher powered tubes.
I briefly had a Benchmark AHB-2 which I also think is a good amp, specially when you consider its adorable size and heat output. It does separation and clarity very well, but stages very flat and has a dryness to the sound. After a great deal of research I decided to give Coda amplifiers a shot. Terry London’s reviews of the No8 and 16.0 as well as threads here at WBF were very influential. I bought the No8 and from the moment I plugged it in I knew it sounded right in a way the other amps I had tried did not. It did everything the AHB-2 did but sounded more real, had more depth, the rightness was present. By the following Monday I’d ordered the 16.0, I needed to hear what the best they could do was.
It took several months to be built and to get it and it improved slightly in almost every way versus the No8, I thought this would be my endgame amplifier. I had it for almost 3 years. I had also upgraded to the Acoustic Zen Crescendo Mk2 from my Adagio’s.
Fast forward to the middle of 2024, I bought the house I am currently in, a few months later I bought my Evolution Acoustics MM2 speakers. After several rounds of treatment to get my room sounding decent enough, one of the times I had my local group of audio buddies over, one of them brought along his Oliver Sayes 2A3 tube amplifier. My new MM2s were more sensitive and higher impedance than my previous Crescendo mk2s, and are somewhat known for being tube friendly, though maybe not 2A3’s.
This amp kind of blew a hole in my amplifier plans. It couldn’t power my speakers at the levels I listen, nor with the music I typically listen to, but with the right music at the right levels, the clarity, and particularly the lack of blur in the transients, once I heard it I couldn’t un-hear it on my own Coda 16.0 anymore. Sure it was most obvious on some particularly transient heavy metal, but once I heard it, it was easy to notice this blur on anything, even just stripped back female vocals with piano. At this point I wasn’t sure such a thing could even be achieved with solid state, but I had to start looking.
Now if we back up a few months to shortly after I bought the house, a friend had shown me this brand Soulnote, saying one of his friends said their top of the line M-3 monoblocks was one of the best amplifiers he had ever heard from the mids up, but the speakers he had used to testing them have an incredibly punishing load in the bass, but it seemed to me like with the correct speakers maybe they would sing. At the time I was already considering the MM2 speakers and was eventually think I would try out a soulnote amp. I also read the designer, Kato-san’s, philosophy page which is fascinating, and lead me to think maybe there was a chance that the Soulnote amplifier would have some of the clarity I wanted. They posit that all the paralleled transistors in most amplifiers cause a certain amount of blur to the sound, and this exactly what I was hearing in my Coda 16.0, which has many paralleled output devices, as most solid state amps do.
So I bought an A-2, and after it showed up I was blown away. This amp might not have had all of the transient clarity I was seeking from the 2A3 amp, but it had a lot of it. It also had a more spacious sound stage and the most surprising thing to me was how much better integrated the bass sounded into the music, I hadn’t really noticed the lack of integration with the 16.0 till I heard the A-2 fix it. I was sitting happy with the A-2, the locals were impressed with the improvements vs the 16.0. The one thing was that it has a slight sort of “excited” coloration. One of my friends called it a “jazz hands” presentation, which I think is an apt descriptor. This as I said is slight and with my main preference for music being metal, this didn’t bother me all that much.
The A-2 uses 4 paralleled output devices. The top of the line A-3 has no parallel devices, only using single complementary pairs of BJTs for each channel, I viewed this as the ultimate form of their vision for blur free audio amplification and was always curious. But I was also worried about only having one device, whether it would give me the precision I also seek from my amplifier, the grip over my speakers, specially for the metal I listen to. So I wasn’t in any rush to buy one without being able to try it first to ensure that 1 device wasn’t a step to far for me.
Then in February 2025 The Music Room listed an A-3 used for sale, so I decided to jump on it, knowing I could always send it back with their return policy if it didn’t work out.
The A-2 is just a taste of the Soulnote sound, a very good taste, and a well priced one, specially at current used prices, I can’t think of anything I’d rather have. But the A-3 takes everything the A-2 did and cranks it to 11, particularly in terms of refinement. The Jazz hands are gone. The blur free presentation I was used to is taken to an absurd level. In the first few days of owning the amp I would often find myself laughing at the way the amp was rendering things in music I had never heard before. The way certain bass lines were presented, the separation, absolutely nothing bluring together. Honestly, with some tracks the lack of blur in the music is almost overwhelming at first. You think you’ve heard these exceptionally complex pieces before, and think there’s a lot to unpack aurally, but even then much of it is being blurred together but you’ve never noticed. With the A-3 all of that blur is gone and the raw amount of information presented is frankly staggering.
Another sidebar. In addition to the attributes listed above about what tube amps excel at, another thing they excel at, and basically only they can do is what me and some of my friends locally and online refer to as the “small stuff”. This is the plankton, the micro dynamics, the micro detail, the real decay, all of those things that take something from sounding like a very good reproduction to sounding real.
Back to the A-3, that “small stuff” wasn’t something I thought I would find here, but not only does the A-3 bring the small stuff, I think in this regard it actually manages to beat tubes at their own game. I am not sure how or why, but Soulnote has seemingly cracked the code with solid state amplifiers, offering something that does everything I want from tubes, without any of the things I don’t want, the heat, the other attributes of tubes, warmth, goo, etc that many audiophiles seek from tubes, none of that is here, but if what you’re after is the absolute clarity of tubes, as well as the micro dynamics, plankton, etc the best tube amplifiers offer, the A-3 brings all of this in spades.
I do still believe, founded or not, that these amps require more careful pairing with speakers than many solid state amps. These aren’t like the Coda that can be plugged into anything and sound pretty good. But with the right speaker I think the A-3 is world class. I have had buddies enjoy the A-2 on speakers in the upper 80s of sensitivity, so maybe my caution is unfounded.
Also a word on warmup, the A-2 and A-3 in my experience both need about an hour. The A-2 will sound like it wants to cut your head off for the first hour. The A-3 however, doesn’t present that way while warming up, it just sounds like a mediocre version of itself.
A week after I got the amp I had my local audio buddies over to hear it, and one thing one of them said that night has stuck with me ever since, “Chase, there’s no reason to try to tell people how good this is, they won’t believe you”
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Thank you for this really insightful. Love these reviews by real people in real environments.
Thank you for the great review. I am a tube guy but I know there are some solid state amps I could possibly be happy with.
I guess there's a statute of limitations on edits here, but I realized I wanted to add another paragraph to the review. I led you up to the door and then didn't walk you through it, I didn't describe the experience of what you got, just alluded to it.
"What you get from all that “small stuff” in the A-3 is a level of realism I haven’t ever experienced before. Particularly in vocals, but in other things as well. In one of my reference female vocal tracks, a line has been crossed with the A-3 where it goes from sounding like a really good reproduction to the real thing. It can be as if the air around the vocalist has been transported into my room. I know this sounds like hyperbole, and I would have said the same till I heard it. The singer and her air are right there between your speakers. It doesn’t happen with every recording, but with the right recordings, magic happens."
"What you get from all that “small stuff” in the A-3 is a level of realism I haven’t ever experienced before. Particularly in vocals, but in other things as well. In one of my reference female vocal tracks, a line has been crossed with the A-3 where it goes from sounding like a really good reproduction to the real thing. It can be as if the air around the vocalist has been transported into my room. I know this sounds like hyperbole, and I would have said the same till I heard it. The singer and her air are right there between your speakers. It doesn’t happen with every recording, but with the right recordings, magic happens."
At the Munich show this year the Soulnote room was easily in the Top 5 best sounding rooms.
They were driving YG speakers and had the Thorens Reference turntable as the source.
The sound quality was so transparent and dynamic with no hard edges.
Other rooms with YG did not sound anywhere near as good.
Apparently the owner of Soulnote uses YG speakers to develop his amplifiers.
They were driving YG speakers and had the Thorens Reference turntable as the source.
The sound quality was so transparent and dynamic with no hard edges.
Other rooms with YG did not sound anywhere near as good.
Apparently the owner of Soulnote uses YG speakers to develop his amplifiers.
@SoupRKnowva
I could afford an A2. But I get a little nervous thinking the first hour it will rip your head off. Does this mean it has a tendency to fatighe?,
How doea the A-2 compare to the 2A3 when it comes to weigbt and body as well as speed that makes things very natural and real sounding. Can you expand more? Are there other amps you can compare it too.
Would you say your A3 voices more like a Dartzeeel, Thrax or Gryphon.
I had a Dartzeel NH 108 Model1. Also had an extended loan on an Atmaspherre Class D. Both neutral with little voice. But my tube amp completely destroyed them when it came to fine details that make it sound real. An example would be a Cuban band of women. One was hitting something wood. When the Blade amp replaced the Dartzeel, it was very clear it was a wood stick striking a wood block. And the block was about 6 feet outside my house in the right cornerr.
I was discussing the idea of warmth and body with the maker of my amp. We both agreed, many times adding warmth smooths over detail. I thought my 845 had nice midbase. But upon a direct compare with my Blade, the Blade bass is for far better. Much better grip, balance, texture. The 845 actually pisses me off in that I am very aware of how sloppy and additive the 845 bass is. I used to enjoy that warmth and weight. But if it's not an actual part of the music, Its a big distraction now. I doubt the A-2 wll do that much damage. But does it add anything that isn't in the source?
Also, did you ever use channel 4 and bypass with a single ended preamp.
I could afford an A2. But I get a little nervous thinking the first hour it will rip your head off. Does this mean it has a tendency to fatighe?,
How doea the A-2 compare to the 2A3 when it comes to weigbt and body as well as speed that makes things very natural and real sounding. Can you expand more? Are there other amps you can compare it too.
Would you say your A3 voices more like a Dartzeeel, Thrax or Gryphon.
I had a Dartzeel NH 108 Model1. Also had an extended loan on an Atmaspherre Class D. Both neutral with little voice. But my tube amp completely destroyed them when it came to fine details that make it sound real. An example would be a Cuban band of women. One was hitting something wood. When the Blade amp replaced the Dartzeel, it was very clear it was a wood stick striking a wood block. And the block was about 6 feet outside my house in the right cornerr.
I was discussing the idea of warmth and body with the maker of my amp. We both agreed, many times adding warmth smooths over detail. I thought my 845 had nice midbase. But upon a direct compare with my Blade, the Blade bass is for far better. Much better grip, balance, texture. The 845 actually pisses me off in that I am very aware of how sloppy and additive the 845 bass is. I used to enjoy that warmth and weight. But if it's not an actual part of the music, Its a big distraction now. I doubt the A-2 wll do that much damage. But does it add anything that isn't in the source?
Also, did you ever use channel 4 and bypass with a single ended preamp.
I wouldn't listen to it the first hour it is on, it is very intense. Once it is warm I dont think I would describe it as fatiguing. There is the slight sort of jazz hands presentation coloration, maybe some would describe it as fatiguing, but it didn't bother me
weight and body aren't really how I think of things...as for speed, both are very fast amplifiers and very clear. A-3 has an edge though in transient clarity and lack of blur.
I dont have an experience with dart, thrax or gryphon at home so I couldn't say.
This is the main way I run the amps, I use the Dave direct into input 5 with the bypass enabled. The built in pre's are very good, but I prefer the Dave direct, I've yet to hear a pre I like more than Dave direct. All of them give up transparency and naturalness.
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