ARC Reference 3 Linestage Preamp / Reference 210 Monoblock Power Amp

The very first time I powered up the new linestage preamp and monoblock power amps from ARC, I knew they were extraordinary. As fate would have it, I was listening to an EMI LP [ASD 2709] of the Shostakovich Second Piano Concerto, with John Ogdon the soloist and Lawrence Foster conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This record sounds gorgeous on any decent stereo, but through the MBL 101 E loudspeakers driven by the Audio Research Reference gear I immediately heard something I’d seldom heard before on any stereo system, though I hear it all the time in live concerts and recitals.

I’d call it “decay”—and it is that— only what audio reviewers usually call decay is the sound of a note that has intentionally been sustained by the performer and persists for a longer-thanusual time. A great example of this is found at the close of the first movement cadenza in the Montsalvatge Concerto Breve [London CS 6990], where the pianist Alicia de Larrocha sustains a chord via finger and pedal for what seems like an eternity, providing a little primer on the way a piano note gradually dies away—tone colors flickering and slowly going out one by one, until all that is left is a single tiny persistent enharmonic overtone that only ceases to sound ever so faintly when de Larrocha finally (and audibly) lets up on keyboard and pedal. If your stereo is capable of superior low-level resolution, the genuine silence—the moment of rest—that follows the extinction of this barely audible harmonic is as breathtaking as the grandest crescendo.

Though the ARC Reference duo will reproduce this sustained note almost as clearly as the $19,000 MBL 6010 D preamp and $73,500 9011 monoblock amps, sostenutos are not the kinds ofdecays I am thinking of. No, what I’ve got in mind is the way the harmonics of ordinary, unaccented notes briefly “hang” in the air before they are “covered up” by the attacks of subsequent notes. In life, you hear this all the time—particularly with piano played solo, but also with ensembles and orchestras. It is the aural equivalent of the persistence of vision—the way the eye/brain holds onto a series of images to form a complete picture. The ear/brain does the same with a series of sounds to form the continuity of music.

What the Audio Research Reference preamp and amp can do in combination— what they, in fact, did with John Ogdon’s first few spare, heart-stopping notes in the gorgeous second movement Andante of the Shostakovich Second—is preserve the way the colors of each of those piano notes lingers just ahead of the note that follows, hanging their harmonics in space like a faint aural afterimage between the dying off of one tone and the utterance of another. Our Mr. P likes to talk about “continuousness”; the Audio Research components give the word a new and, to my mind, essential meaning. They “fill in the gaps” between and among notes more realistically than any other electronics I’ve heard.

If bringing a new and unparalleled realism to the reproduction of the duration of notes were all that the ARC Reference 3 and Reference 210 did, they would qualify as some sort of hi-fi breakthrough. But that is not all they do. Not by half.

First there is Audio Research’s tonal palette. If, in life and in audio, tone colors must perforce be projected against a tinted backdrop, I’ll take ARC’s offwhite canvas over the raven blackness of much solid-state, the toast-brown of certain other tube gear, and the chalk of certain examples of each topology (such as Spectral and middle-vintage ARC). To my ear, this “neutral” background interferes less with the purity of timbres— doesn’t skew them as much toward the darkness of bass or the brightness of treble. As a result, tonal balance in the Reference gear is sensationally “right.” I have not heard such meltingly beautiful, true-to-life string, wind, and brass tone nor such persuasively realistic reproduction of voices (try “All My Trials” on PP&M’s In the Wind [Warner WS1507]—a record that, for vocal realism alone, belongs in the Baker’s Dozen of HP’s SuperDisc Pop List) since I used the late, lamented Tenor Wp75 OTLs as my references, although the Tenors were substantially brighter and edgier in the upper-mids than the ARC amp and preamp and did not have their awesome authority in the bass.

Speaking of the bottom octaves… while nothing I’ve yet heard can outdo the MBL 6010 D/9011 on dynamics, extension, and resolution in the bass—at least with the difficult-to-drive MBL 101 E loudspeakers—the ARC combo comes closer than other amps I’ve tried, including some solid-state. (This is surprising for usually-thick-in-the-bottomoctaves tube gear and bears upon another one of ARC’s successes—greatly improved bandwidth and overall transient response.) On massed cellos and doublebasses or timps or low brass and winds, the ARC gear has massive “authority,” projecting bass-range crescendos toward you like rolling thunder.