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diophiles have just one source? Why then not produce a

dedicated headphone amp only, so that people can con

nect it to their normal preamp? It just didn‘t make sense,

it seemed a terribly niche produce aimed at people with

one source and who also used headphones.

Then the penny dropped. The biggest group of users

for this product are going to be the growing number of

people using their computer as the main music source

and/or who want quality music at their workstation. Ah

Ha! Is Norbert Lehmann once again getting ahead of the

game? With so many people using high-speed connec

tion to download music at ever higher rates, the quality

of the components down the chain from the computer

have become the bottleneck. Now those clever under-

desk mountings for the amps start to make sense. The

pairing are going to be spot on for that market.

But sadly I‘m not in that market and need every input I

can get so I‘m not a potential customer (yet!) so in my

case the pairing had to perform as the main hi-ﬁ pre/po

wer for the purposes of the review.

As for rest of the usual ‚in-use‘ section, there isn‘t much

to say - you plug them in, little blue lights come on and

they work - simple.

Sound

The pairing were tried using two speaker systems. The

ﬁrst was my main system driven by the Opera Droplet

CD player into my Loth-x Polaris horns, the second pair

of speakers were the Trivox Pure S reviewed last month.

The latter company actually uses the Stamp during de

monstrations and the pairing was recommended to me

by Norbert so for once I didn‘t have to worry about mis

matches - the job was done for me.

The inevitable question is of course how does the Stamp

compare with the dreaded $30 T-amp. This little won

der is a scary proposition for anyone, but it does have

weaknesses. Bass below 200 Hz appears to roll off, and

there is a certain sterility to the sound - it‘s not harsh,

just cold.

The Stamp sounded utterly different. In fact I was un

prepared for how much more powerful and ‚full‘ it soun

ded. It‘s not warm like some valve amps or a Musical

Fidelity Class A from the 80‘s, but it had a weight and

purpose lacking in the T-amp. Partly this is down to the

Tripath chip the T-amp uses (the 2024), but just a glance

at the internals of the two will show we are dealing with

a totally different order of construction quality, both in

components and their layout. Sadly such time spent of

being clever doesn‘t guarantee success, but in this case

the effort is richly rewarded. Personally, though totally

awed by the T-amp‘s abilities at the price I just wouldn‘t

be able to live with it long term in the kind of highly re

vealing, full-range system I have, the Linear/Stamp is a

different-kettle-of-ﬁsh...

Take the Pretenders album ‚Last of the Independents‘.

This hugely underrated album has a generally bright

and forward mix on CD, and the ﬁrst track in particular

with its opening high guitar and thrash drumming can

really make you wince. With some systems I even skip

this track or dip the volume so unpleasant can it be The

Lehmann pairing kept all its edginess and drive but ma

naged to walk the tightrope of listenability. The album

seems to calm down a little after this (perhaps the ears

habituate!) and the production can be seen as incredibly

detailed and open, with excellent soundstaging. The amp

here clearly shows that Tripath characteristic of a huge,

wide stage, but also resolves depth better than other di

gital amps I‘ve tried. The width being better than by own

300b SE monoblocks and the depth similar, if more ‚et

ched‘. The danger of such soundstaging is that it can lea

ve much music as disconnected musical units placed in a

matrix of ambience - the Lehmanns avoid this by giving

the performers more solidity than other digital amps I‘ve

tried, so that the whole becomes a sum-of-parts. It‘s not

the ‚best‘ soundstaging in the world, anymore than there

is a ‚best‘ wine - it‘s just one ﬂavour of production and

one which this writer is happy with.

Detail retrieval is excellent without pushing small, in

signiﬁcant details (like breathing and sax mechanisms

clattering) to the fore - you get all the music and the

frills as well, but don‘t expect to hear ‚the smack of her

lips opening‘ type detail that some aspire to, and which

is often the result of emphasising midband detail at the

expense of balance and - well music I guess...

Bass performance is tight without being too dry - I like

the balance/compromise struck. In some systems you

might wish for more weight, but this will depend on sys

tem matching as much as personal taste. Certainly the

32 foot organ pipes (16 Hz) from the opening of the

2001 ﬁlm soundtrack rattled everything in the room, and

the almost sub-subliminal Grosse Caisse at the opening

of ‚American in Paris‘ tapped your diaphragm, but this

sort of trick is hardly relevant to most music... More ap

propriate is the deft handling of Level 42‘s bass, and the

ambient clues from Madonna‘s ‚I Love New York‘ during

the street scene.

With both speaker systems dynamic swings were well

handled, but as both have dynamic abilities in spades

and are easy to drive (the Loth-x‘s ridiculously so) this