MAGICAL SYNERGY — MOLA MOLA TAMBAQUI, LTA Z10e & STAX SR-009S!

WHAT:

“My god it’s a piano! It really sounds like a piano! The spaciousness, the air, the $#%@& you-are-there intimacy! Wow, I’ve never heard this song (track, concert, album) like that before. So real, natural, tactile. That's palpable! Transparent, transparent, transparent! So musical and so (your two-word expletive here) sweet. Nuance rich!” These are but a few of the phrases pulled from my novel posing as review notes on the Mola Mola Tambaqui. ($13,500) And I warn you, there is an ocean of superlatives ahead.

Is it possible that tremendous transparency, resolution, and clarity can arouse anticipation? Imagine for a moment watching as Emmanuelle Bertrand sets bow to cello strings and, momentarily, holds the bow in place. There is anticipation of the notes, the music to soon flow forth. In this selfsame way the STAX SR-009S ($4545), perhaps, via its transparency, resolution, clarity, its blazing transient speed arouses the same kind of anticipation.

This story and that epiphany bring us to the subject of this review—the Linear Tube Audio (LTA) Z10e ($6950)Headphone/Integrated Amplifier, where the “e” stands for “electrostatic.” The Z10e has issued in yet another epiphany for me, in a venue—headphone/headgear listening—that I, at one time, took for granted, if not wholly ignored. And to set the record straight, high-end audio and digital audio, in particular, are quantum levels above where they were just a few short years ago, let alone the late 1980’s.

WHY:

A time and space machine, indeed, for the when and where the Mola Mola Tambaqui transports one. Impossible it is, to write the concluding notes of this review, to break away from the spellbinding music or magic that this DAC/Headphone amplifier creates. Max Richter’s The Blue Notebook plays and the music sweeps over me as though my yellow-chair-tardis finds its way, through time and space, to this venue and that. And depending on the track of this album, I am at a beach, in deep space, in a room where a typewriter drums out a poem or a verse on white, textured paper. Or, perhaps, I am in a cathedral amidst angelic voices.

I have spent quite some time with the LTA Z10e and have heard it with every headphone in house and those that have come and gone. In this respect the Z10e is a reviewer’s dream for its wide-ranging compatibility with headphones, ALL headphones! And the Z10e will bring to them a profound naturalness and musicality, an air-filled-spaciousness, and a transparency that is, in my experience, astonishing!

The STAX SR-009S may represent, for many, a transcendent listening experience. It may move you beyond expectation to that which you never imagined possible in a earspeaker or headphone. And should its stable of playmates be able—of good musical repute and like ability and up to task—then you will find yourself in another world of music, altogether and, like me, traveling across time and space, from venue to venue, experiencing sublime enjoyment.

The combination of these three components are musically fantastical, in the extreme! If you have the opportunity to listen to them, then please do and a slice of nirvana you will, indeed, experience! And please, let me know when you do.

This combination, to date, is an AudioKey Reviews Magical Synergy of Magical Synergies and we happily move it to the top of the Magical Synergies list.

NOTE: You will see the Mola Mola Tambaqui again in Magical Synergies. It’s that good!