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| Review - Orca Preamp and Alecto Power Amplifiers |
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Alectrifying - Orca/Alecto Amplifiers
Once cured of the hi-fi bug, Eric Braithwaite feels it bite again thanks to Michell's new Orca pre and Alecto power amps.
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After years of being lectured about its evils, I can come out at last. Here, in a now terribly trendy part of London, there's a coffee-shop on nearly every corner and even one opposite my flat. Coffee is the new cocaine-addictive, brain-cell-destroying, health-running drug, but it's out in the open, being freely enjoyed by thousands. I love it.
Pity my other addiction, refuelled recently by Michell Engineering's Orca pre and new Alecto power amplifiers, is still a hole-in-the-corner affair. Where are the hi-fi shops crowded with the yuppies, 20-odd-year-olds in oval shades, designer trainers! Wouldn't it be great if hi-fi with designer credentials rather than café latte (I mean, it's just milky coffee whichever way you stir it) became the new coffee the way football became the new fashion or, in fashion, brown became the new black! The Orca and its attendant power supply with their smoked acrylic, shaped stainless steel and aluminium are as elegant as an Alessi.
Both Orca and Alecto designs are new ground-up (from the ground up, maybe we'd better day: blame the caffeine). And, as always, in style and especially quality of engineering, Michell's new components are the Blue Mountain of hi-fi. The knobs on the pre-amplifier - solid, beautifully balanced fitting within a hair's breadth of the dark acrylic fascia-are as smooth as a finely-roasted, shiny Arabica bean. And the simple remote volume control is a small, round disc that fits comfortably in the palm. Made of machined aluminium it has exactly the sensuous feel and weight of the cricket ball. And yes, I asked: John Michell was a bowler...
One way of telling quickly whether hi-fi is just good or superb might appear highly esoteric, but actually isn't. If you use vinyl the method is to listen to the sound of the groove-it should be completely separate from the music, like an unobtrusive solo instrument. To a lesser extent the trick will work with CDs where there is still residual tape noise or microphone hiss.
In other words, the Orca is extraordinarily quiet, in the way that usually only comes with battery power. That means a surprising amount of recorded ambience and detail come through, including some very low-level outside chatter on a Nimbus CD (which escaped not only the engineers but me for several years) and a hall ambience on a Klemperer ASD LP that truly and naturally enveloped the orchestra.
More importantly, it also means very pure instrumental tome that made not only strings but all forms of brass a delight. Listening to the excellent Isis recording of Martin Souter showed the George IV harpsichord had every plucked string perfect, plus a clear sense of the room at Kew. The higher notes can sound jangly even on more than competent equipment, but not with the Orca. It didn't soften them, just gave each its perfect interval. The admirally spot-on-timing of attack and decay became even clearer when the Alectos were wired into the system in place of a Quad 707.
The second sign of superior equipment is simply discovering that you play a great deal of music of practically every genre, and sit back and enjoy it. Here the Orca suffers a problem-or rather in my ears displays a virtue-that beset the Iso and Argo HR: second-rate recordings will, alas, stay resolutely second-rate.
Neither the Alecto nor the Orca, and especially not the Orca, will cover up the abominable compression and distortion as the bar-graph meter slips up to 0dB on so many current Rock recordings, like Morrissey?s, for example. Well-produced CDs like KD Lang?s Drag are not diminished; that's a spacious and well-equalised mix and the Michell equipment gave it studio control-room quality. Nor will either add another half-dozen kilo Hertz to the top of some of the classic Columbias in dire need of it.
Normally, individual instruments had what could only be described as a 'luminescence?' that hardly appears outside real life. Though the strings on the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez were detailed down to the warp of the catgut, the Orca didn't ameliorate their fierceness in the Philips San Antonio recording (but they weren't so shrilly, distorted-as to be painful).
The last time Richter's Bach organ recital on a Decca SXL was anywhere near that clean and detailed in its pipework - the sound of the bellows gently breathing in the background, too-was with Chord's SPM 600/CPA 2200 combination. The Alectos have a richer, rounder bass, albeit truer than their predecessors and better in timing. The Harbeth Compact 7s used with them display a minuscule failing: tenor voices have a 'BBC Radio chestiness' which the Alectos either revealed more obviously than usual or added to in a very slight degree.
Too many CDs and LPs fed the Orca and Alectos for me to go into each and every title, but they all had a genuinely high-end timbre on instruments, holographic and precise imagery and, especially on the part of the new Alectos, free and effortless dynamics. Seldom does a recording like Mingus' tortuous The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady attract a non-jazz aficionado, but it fascinated one such visitor with its awesome grasp of the dynamics of tubas, trombones, muted trumpet, piano and delicate, spidery cymbal brushwork.
Differences between old and new? Well, the Orca is not only stunningly quieter than the Argo HR, it's even more finely detailed and it at last has a volume potentiometer from Panasonic which gains remote control and separate L/R balance for precise channel matching down to practically inaudible levels (and the promise it won't drift over time like the Argo's).
The new Alectos? Again, everything is that much cleaner, deeper (front-to-back that is), tighter and faster than the original. A quick comparison of two of the recordings used on the originals shows what's what. Item 1 is the extraordinary 'surround-sound' effect of a Chapman Stick, which swings around the listeners' heads. One the new Alectos it described a smaller but utterly seamless circle; that's tighter control for you.
Item 2 is the even greater distance between the shaky background vocalist and the loudspeakers on Lou Reed's 'Power and Glory' from his Magic and Loss CD. Extreme resolution like this puts the Orca on a par with the Chord, and the Chord is one of the top two or three preamplifiers I've ever heard. The Orca, in short, is to the Argo and other pre-amplifiers what the Orbe is to a Gyrodec. It made my Gyrodec resolve things I only knew of from an Orbe before.
As you may have noticed, I took a twelve-month cure from the heroin of hi-fi. It's failed. Michell's new Orca and Alecto have re-addicted me. If that means I'm put down as a Kaffee-Klatch Michell partisan, so be it. Just remember: like Mr. Lloyd's original invention, some things reappear better than ever.
Eric Braithwaite
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Web design : Trichord Research
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