I can't resist -- I/AudioQuest, used a CH C1.2 into the Riviera Labs APL01SE and Riviera Labs AFM100 amps to drive Rockport Orions in my Munich 2023 exhibit. The CH source and Riviera amplification was superb! Of course AQ Niagara and Dragon might have helped too.
Those particular Riviera pieces normally drive Wilson Sasha DAWs at my Netherlands headquarters. At home in CA I have a dCS Vivaldi One Apex feeding an APL01SE and a pair of AFM50s driving Rockport Cygnus speakers -- With glorious results -- the no-pain version of extreme resolution and dynamics.
Two other personal systems, in CA and NYC, have a variable output (real preamp amp output stage) Aesthetix Romulus driving Riviera Labs AFM25 amps into Rockport Atria II and Rockport Avior II speakers. Yes, 25 watts truly can pass for infinite power, until it can't. All AFMs have the most exuberantly playful bass I've ever had the pleasure of living with. "Exuberantly playful" might sound like a coloration to some. I believe it's an appropriate way to describe less-compromised, less-distorted.
Silvio and Luca know what they are doing. Beyond the particulars of harmonic distortion, the Riviera gear is extraordinary in addressing what I have called-out for the last 50 years as the most important imperative in good audio: the challenge towards becoming one with the music as presented by an audio system is not the need for more information, it's the mandate to suffer less misinformation.
Hearing is an active process that absolutely requires our brains to cheat during the 50 or so milliseconds it takes before an aural image is presented to our consciousness. The composition we think the ear/mic is picking up is actually a combination of data from our speakers, our evolutionarily advantageous genetically programmed predictive algorithms, learned from "nurture" predictive algorithms, memories -- and crucially, imagination.
Thank heavens we are sometimes dead wrong with what we think we hear as a result -- without our brains making-sh*t-up, we would not have a stereo image, the immersive sound field so many of us crave.
The primary limitation to our brain's ability to construct a maximally engaging emotionally provocative aural image is not a lack of information so much as it's the interference to that process caused by noise and distortion (misinformation).
By noise, I don't mean tape hiss or a tick or pop on an LP -- those are properly reproduced information that we insult by calling them noise. I mean real noise, energy that shouldn't be there and which can't be "demodulated" into anything meaningful enough for the brain to then present as a discrete sound. This noise, whether energy coming out of a dielectric (caps, cable insulation) at the wrong time, or skin-effect caused inductance smearing a signal across time, TIM, or all sorts of energy challenges in the digital domain -- is what creates the not-black background that causes most of us to refer to the benefit of reducing the misinformation as "the music emerging from a blacker background" -- when there was no discernible white or gray background to begin with.
I believe everything Luca writes about in explaining his Riviera Labs design priorities -- and I believe that the extraordinarily open and deep soundstage that the Riviera gear enables is foremost the result of less unseen and unheard garbage/obstacles in the way of our algorithms and imagination doing their absolutely necessary jobs.
