Yeah, a deep dive down the Infinity Rabbit hole for sure!
maybe, we should cut and paste all those articles here for posterity, nothing online lasts forever, you know.
In the Stereophile Servo Statik review, from 1968, I find it very interesting that the amplifiers used were
Crown's
Sae
Dynaco.
And J Gordon Holt Loved the sound with the Crown, as well as loved the sound with tube amps, even though, as I suspect was the theory of the day, he said the Tube amps were unable to reproduce the frequencies as 'accurately' as a SS amp, but he still liked it.
Then, seven years later
From the 1975 Stereophile review of the SS 1...
One of the odd things we have observed for many years but have tried not to think too much about is how it is possible for two top-rated speaker systems to sound so different. The implication thereof would seem to be that one of them is "right" and the other "wrong," or—worse—that both are wrong. It now begins to look as though the third conclusion was the correct one, for not only are the SS-1A and the FMI J-Modular better—ie, more natural—reproducers than any systems we have heard previously, they are more alike. The fact that they still don't sound the sane raises the same old question, but their similarity—under certain conditions which we'll mention subsequently—suggests that the Holy Grail of high fidelity, Ultimate Perfection, may not be all that far over the horizon.
Before we go into any further detail about the sound of the SS-1A, a word about associated components. In our last issue, we climbed out on a limb with the statement that the best possible reproduction of sound today was from the best tubed components. The SS-1A was one of the speakers that led us to that conclusion. We tried every solid-state amplifier in the house, including Infinity's own class-D switching amplifier, as driving amps for the tweeters and midrange panels of the SS-1A, and among the four pairs of educated ears that collaborate on our listen-ins, all felt the tubed amplifiers did the best job of reproducing that exceedingly delicate balance between sweetness and sharpness that is the sound of live music.
We tried Ampzilla, the Dyna Stereo 400, the Epicure One, Infinity's amp, and the tubed Audio Research D-76A and Paoli 60M. We listened to original tapes made with a variety of mikes and in different acoustical environments, we listened to domestic and imported discs and open-reel tapes, and tried a few experiments involving trying to reproduce the sound of a speaking voice and comparing it with the person standing midway between the speakers. The D-76A won every time, driving both the middle-range and tweeter panels.