Just had the Leak Stereo 130 amp from Richer Sounds, cut to the chase it’s being returned.
A quick warning for anyone purchasing this. If you find the remote not doing anything apart from going to stand by or mute. Look at the two buttons at the bottom of the remote labelled device. I thought they were there to switch source or device. No they control what device the remote is controlling! See the small print in the manual.
Playing Beethoven's piano sonatas I noticed an extra note appearing from time to time. I traced that to the ventilation top plate ringing like a bell on certain notes. I wasn’t listening at very loud volumes either.
On choral music there was a wonderful sense of air around the performers, just ‘more’ as my wife said. But if you’re looking for some lovely fruity bass guitar sounds on Dark side of the moon forget it. Strangely you could feel the presence of studio air con on some recordings. Real sub bass and barely audible that I’ve never heard before.
Blue tooth. Superb quality from Tidal on my old Moto G6 smart phone. Never used Bluetooth and didn’t realise it could sound so good. A nice feature was that the remote could pause and jump tracks from the phone.
Tried the phono stage on an old Trio KD1033 and AT95E cartridge. A fantastic sense of space and detail but not at the expense of added surface noise. Probably the best I’ve every heard from vinyl. I use a Rega phono stage or direct into my amp’s internal phono amp usually.
The same was true for the headphone output. Using my old beat up pair of £20 Sennheiser closed back phones. It was like I wasn’t wearing them. I’ve used head phones for years at work and at home and I’ve never heard anything like it.
The amp runs quite warm, surprisingly so on my efficient 90dB/W Monitor Audio Bronze 5’s. Under the same conditions my Onkyo A9010 runs stone cold. Mind you it has a heat sink that is so big that I’d doubt it would fit in the Leak Amp’s case!
I fed the amp either from the co ax digital output from a Cambridge Streamagic 6 or directly from the audio output from the Cambridge. Couldn’t hear a difference. I tried Rock, Classical, Choral, Radio , Broadcast TV and yes lovely detailed sound but where’s that bass?