Is this the ULTIMATE High End Audio System? - Bandwidth Audio Review

What is your ULTIMATE or DREAM high-end audio system? Sound off below! Watch the whole video to find out if you won our U-Turn giveaway.

An Amplifier is not supposed to sound like anything, just pass the signal through.

My call it a day system is the Boulder 866 integrated with La Scalas.

Great show. I know yall both like Yamaha and Bandwidth Audio and just wondering whether y'all think that the $5k Aurora One preamp can sound as good as the Yamaha C-5000 preamp that costs double the price of the Bandwidth Audio pre.

Hi Andrew. What would you recommend to improve my music sound by adding/changing from my setup: L+R+C Wharfedale EVO 4.2 and 4.4 (I wanted to watch TV listening from Center channel), Yamaha Adventage RX-A2A receiver, Rega P3 phono, Apple Music app in my TV connected through eARC to receiver and CDs played through a Sony Blu-ray player?

Living in tubes....fit my ears superbly...

Do the Heresy's do justice to the Bandwidth system? Really like your channel. If Bandwidth was your personal system, what spkrs would you pair it with?

I was all in… Then you tell me no remote? C’mon man! 😉

I get where Andrew is going but you know ‘dream’ is misleading in this context. I think maybe it’s all relative to where one’s values lay? Or, maybe it is ‘realizable dream’? I’m relatively new into audiophile-land, but have figured out what most people have figured out, that few people have the resources to fund a limitless addiction. So, we are mostly left with finding our own sweet spot. I’ve spoken to a number of audiophile sales people with hundreds of years (cumulatively) hi end audio experience, and there is very little uniformity out there other than a recognition that if one is nearing 20K one can land a spot in audiophile town that will be astonishing.

My landing zone was a pair of Focal Kanta No 2 speakers, a Naim Uniti Nova, and a Rel S/812 subwoofer. Good cables. No interest in vinyl. I can rip older CD’s and attach via SD card, USB drive or hard disk, but the Nova has 80 W per channel, a built in DAC, and a built in streamer. TIDAL and QOBUZ. There I am, listening to astonishing jazz, classical, vocals. Around 20K.

Can you do 2 chanel solid state system 🤔

Have you ever heard Arogon amps before? And would you ever review Arogon amps

No inherent character? Sounds like Peter Walker's, he who founded Quad, theoretical "straight wire with gain."

This system would have sounded amazing in the La Scala Speakers.

Andrew, first, calling the components you review a system is highly misleading. Traditionally, a sound system is comprised of three basic components: source, amplification, and speakers. You are addressing only amplification. Google it for verification.

I would find it critical to know what speakers, turntable and DAC go best with the components and why. You've done that very well in other reviews. Your failure to do it on this one is puzzling. The questioning part of me wonders if you are mostly trying to promote gear made in your home town or area.

Second, you don't comment much about the aesthetics of the components. To see switches of the kind these components sports is hardly a modern aesthetic. However, modern or not, it clashes in my opinion with the design of the pieces as a whole.

Third, it's fine and dandy to avoid describing a sound signature by saying components are neutral. However, the only way to truly know if they are is if you were at the recordings and your recollections approach the sound quality produced by these components, with your speakers and turntable or DAC, and of course your ears. Absent that, you are hearing coloration that you choose to call neutral.

I've read your reviews with interest because I like your delivery. It's more that of a very good news anchor. I also like that you discuss how something makes you feel. I do wish your partner would deliver her opinions on camera. She sounds intelligent and seems to have presence, at least in her voice. Other than possibly because of logistics, why is she not on camera?

I know you are making a living from making these videos and I'm happy you can do so while living your passion. However, after watching this video my takeaway was "Oh, please, don't turn too commercial on me."

There is no ultimate but if there was it would involve vacuum tubes, big paper cones, accordion surrounds, and loads of DIY satisfaction.

Andrew, sometimes u make me feel like becoming an audiophile, then I eventually remember why u inspire me and why I don't unsubscribe...lol cheers!

I love your videos man. It’s amazing that the description is enjoyable that makes up for lack of ability to listen to such gear live. Well done! Have you thought about reviewing your viewers gear offline for fun? Cheers!

Be grateful for trash trucks, Andrew for they help to maintain the livability of your neighbourhood.

this is a great episode (as if it were made for me). thank you.
to answer your question. my dream audio system would be Wilson Speakers paired with an integrated tube amp .
thou the Million dollar question is: what's the RIGHT Amp to use that has a Digital Inputs with an Analog out ?. the Bandwidth is definitely the wrong equipment for me ( since it does zero digital to audio conversion as you said).. your thoughts would be greatly appreciated. thanks again

Ah, the smell of burning 🔥 dog hair as it gently wafts down onto those beautiful tubes 😆👌🎉

Save some scratch and check out the doge tube mono blocks and pre amp at under 5k , . . .with remote.

Good lookin tubes!

SO WHAT! for the noise, it call life.

High end system with rich money to burn low end ears. That is by the time high end is affordable your ear response will be 40 to 10K Hz, so sad.

baffel me with bull shit high end audio .okay now how about high end noise from out side its the new tech.

Curious beast those power amps..monoblock and preamp and volume control etc. Why use another preamp if those are good amps and have preamp sections etc?

This is the audio equivalent of a Civic Type R. Ferrari would be a total Audio Note system. With this you get 95% of that for about 1/30 th of the price. Which is better? I guess that depends on your emotional needs, or the zeros in your bank account.

Is anyone familiar with the FORTE model 3 amplifier? Got it for a song... is it worth keeping now days?

What an incredible system. Very nice to see. You’re totally right about the caveats, sometimes convenience is more important than performance.
I don’t know if ferraris have heated seats or a great radio but I can imagine it to be something like that.

we are a world community. why is it important that your equipment be made in america.

The brand name "Bandwidth" hints at a fundamental understanding of audio (voice, music) and human hearing. Most of us cannot hear above 20kHz (20,000 Hz) and electrical engineers us that given as an alibi or excuse for their designs.
I argue that most things humans listen to play between 110Hz and 1760Hz: two octaves below and two octaves above the piano's central A (in today's tuning, that is, where that A is tuned at 440Hz - meaning this could vary a bit, depending on historical insights).
What is the problem? In human hearing we can distinguish mother's voice from dad's, filter the cracks caused by a potentially dangerous predator out of the noises of the environment and we can distinguish a clarinet from a saxophone, or focus our concentration on a single instrument in a 100 head symphony orchestra, be they timpani, piano, trombone, English horn or a soprano vpice.
All in the 110Hz to 1760Hz range - generally.
How come we can distinguish a clarinet from a saxophone when both play the same tone?
Because we don't listen for sine waves but because our hearing system does a wave shape analysis. It can distinguish dad from mom when both produce a 440Hz tone in their speech. A clarinet produces a blockwave and a transversal flute a sine wave.
What frequency range does our electronics need? If we take a blockwave, we have to understand that its vertical rise or fall requires almost infinitely high frequency response and what makes it even more difficult is the transition from vertical to horizontal in a blockwave. Just that transition needs infinite frequency expressed in sine waves.
If a couple things are insufficient in an amplifier then a blockwave input signal becomes a sawtooth, or each transition from vertical to horizontal has a bad overshoot. The saw tooth is really bad. Is that overshoot a problem? Well if we analyze the smooth sound of a cello, we see that its sine wave has a couple spikes that compare to the overshoot in the blockwave.
If you run a 20kHz blockwave through an audio amplifier of any brand, you'll be surprised how bad most of these perform.

And this is where the engineers behind a couple brand names implied their understanding of all this "exact wave shape reproduction". "Spectral Audio" with its very wide frequency range when talking sine waves. Accuphase underlining accurate phase is less clear but a very important aspect. And now "Bandwidth Audio" because "bandwidth" is what we need for precise wave shape reproduction with zero phase changes because of that, especially zero of the frequency dependent/variant ones.
Is there a difference her between "solid state" and "vacuum tube"?
Well, solid state can really do what we need, but each active component like transistor is a network of resistors, capacitors and potentially some induction things - yes, like a crossover filter. The risk of frequency dependent coloration or phase change is inherent. There is significant "mass" in the signal path with inertia. And this is where the vacuum seems to have a better starting point. A design with no capacitors in the signal path could excel. A power supply that filters AC pollution out and provides stable clean real DC can shine. A design that does not relay AC hum or derivatives into the audio stream can shine. And well made tubes with a in-design, in -implementation frequency response up to 15 or 20kHz may actually outperform simple solid state because of their bandwidth and ability to produce faithful blockwaves: so this can do a 440Hz clarinet tone much better.
The likes of Audio Research, Jadis, Macintosh Audio, Conrad-Johnson, Audio Note and Nagra all know how to benefit from vacuum tunes and avoid the pitfalls of hum and coloration.
Having mentioned crossover filters in the solid state context, there is one thing that vacuum tubers have against them: transformers. These induction devices - used in crossover filters too - are often used to simply solve one problem: voltage amplification. To run electricity though air or nothing we need high voltages. Very high, actually. So a glass amplification stage may output an extreme voltage (with very low Ampères) that no speaker/driver can handle. High impedance drivers have been made to partially address this, but even then most glass amplifiers would use a transformer in an output channel to lower voltage and at the same time up the Ampères, thus being able to drive a speaker's driver. The problem, again, with these transformers is that they can introduce frequency dependent distortion, thus messing up wave shape. There are two approaches and they do not fully exclude each other: use an output stage design that is able to generate the lower voltage and higher current (Ampère) through special vacuum tubes, or use extremely wall made transformers that potentially use different metallurgy in the long strand of wire (e.g. hand-wound silver wire coils, or using a winding machine under human supervision, etc. We can expect an amplifier with couple kilograms of silver wire in its transformers to make that amp more expensive).

Or so I hypothesize.

And the "astonishment" of one person about the qualities of products called "Bandwidth Audio" (BA) in my case just confirms my hypothesis and prejudice. As to the prices mentioned here, an entire BA system may be as expensive as one component of one of the other brands mentioned above.

What about power? Well, with efficient speakers you only need a couple Watts to scare the neighbors. As human hearing follows a logarithmic pattern, you need exponentially more power to get louder than that. And heavy bass needs huge power. If you don't want to scare the neighbors' neighbors, or terrorize people in the streets with heavy bass toes, if you want to retain your very good hearing until you are very old, then you don't need more than a couple Watts (30 or 50 already being excessive).
And if your speaker of preference is difficult to drive and has a crossover that can support more than one amplifier, consider bi-amping or more than bi=2. This may alter the impedance by the way and you may need to adjust your vacuum tube's output for that.

If you have ever listened to the best solid state and the best vacuum tube audio, then there are no surprises. The biggest surprise would be for electrical engineers to understand all this and by not wasting consumer products with bad designs and components drive the prices down.

Now looking at "Bandwidth Audio" specifications, the cold dry numbers for the phono-prepre and the per-amplifiers look good: wide bandwidth. The regular 288 monoblock does well too. On paper.

love the vids just wish I had 10k spare

move to the country man. buy some Cornwall 4's

Interesting video. Watching your videos would be a even more pleasurable experience if you didn't say the full name of the product every single time. Especially when it has a long name. You can just say "this system" or equivalent from time to time. Except for that, a very informative and great video

JBL Studio Monitor 4367 + Hegel P30 + Hegel H30 + Cambridge Audio CXN v2

Ummm Trash trucks ARE there for a reason.......LOL

so how did the Heresy IV do in this set up or would you have rather listened on a different set of speakers?

$17,000 is a lot to pay for something with generic $2 power switches. I hope the internal components are where they spent the money.

You can't buy a decent car for $17,000 anymore. I'd go for a kick-ass custom listening system for my home and buy a used car that gets me from point A to point B.

I would suggest for the ultimate bang for your buck you review Black Ice Audio’s F360 vacuum tube preamp and their F35 integrated stereo tube amp.
“F” stands for Fosgate

Excellent and complete, you did not leave questions to ask, thanks and congrats for so excellent review, Saludos !!

Ahh Ha ha ha, I thought that trash truck was outside my house at the beginning of the video. They volume was not high, but your audio was picking it up. Good woofers are just good.

You could spend a lot more than $17K for a similar tube component system, and unlike that Ferrari they do last a lifetime. Alas, who would make such an investment without listening to it first? My local dealer allowed me to set up a trial, in my room, with my speakers and with my music. Giving me the confidence to select the right one for me makes the investment a whole lot easier.
Interesting story- thanks, Andrew.

All that and you didn’t even let us hear it ;(

Jbl k2 s9900 speakers. Raven shaman tube monoblocks
Schiit yggdrasil 2 dac Innuos zenith mk3 streamer ripper 6tb storage jl audio double woofer fathom subs with high end cables. I'm done.

Had not heard about Bandwidth at all. The no remote is perfect! Was actually looking for a separate, high quality but bare bones pre-amp. Will have to investigate this one a bit more. Wonder whether they do in-home trials.

If I had tube amps, I’d have them out front and center. They look so beautiful! Would never hide them away. Would rather close the room to anyone who could mess with them. Great looking system!

$17K. It can get much much worse I'm sure you agree.

Zeos want you to add two Edifier speaker stands..... $50 each.

The glow of those beautiful analog ammeters make me all warm and fuzzy.