Hi, I am very tempted by the opportunity to buy a VPI 299D Integrated Amplifier; I have read the reviews and read some discussions about why VPI made them, etc, but I have not find a detailed review from a current or past owner about the sound quality, if it is really worth the investment or if it is just the hype of VPI TTs owners? How does it compares to a McIntosh IA, for example.
I have professionally recapped Marantz 2252B in great shape but think I can do more to really get the most out of my music. Thanks in advance for your advice and opinions.
New 299D owner here. I have only had it for about 10 days but in that time it has rocked my sonic world. There have been/are some great deals on this amp recently and I took advantage of one. But even for the full asking price, I would agree with Steve Guttenberg's assessment that it's a sonic bargain even at $4000. The retro looks and finish are awesome too.
As you probably already know it's a very strictly limited edition of 100 and, according to the dealer who sold me mine, there's been a bit of a perception issue with buyers investing a few grand in one of these instead of a Primaluna, say, when VPI is an unknown quantity when it comes to building tube amps. But if you look at the pedigree here, you'll see that Steve Leung of VAS hand built all 100 models at VPI and it was a labor of love project between him and Harry Weisfeld. As such it's one of those amps that appears greater than the sum of its parts and is full to the gunnels with prime features like two wide bandwidth output transformers with a heck of a lot of oomph, a toroidal power supply transformer, ALPs motor potentiometer on the volume, silver plated signal cables and, crucially, point to point construction.
What we have here, I think, is a super good looking future classic that many VPI enthusiasts, and others, will lust after when it's no longer available new, such are the vagaries of supply and demand. Although some dealers now appear to be keen to offload their, admittedly small, stocks of the 299D, I'm pretty sure that prices will start to escalate North when the last available new models have gone.
I'd say that as soon as you hear one of these you're sold. Suffice it to say it does everything as well as you'd hope, probably even better than that. It's obviously such a limited run product that, in the grand scheme of things, very few have actually auditioned one. Trust me, they have missed out on something special here.
An audiophile friend of mine is a Primaluna Prologue integrated owner and considers my 299D to be the better amp, having visited me for a listening evening earlier this week. I haven't heard the Dialogue integrated, which is probably the more equivalent model, as it does share a good number of similar high quality features. It doesn't have the autobias feature that the Primalunas have, but I'm the sort of guy who'd rather bias manually anyway, as I've always done it with my solid state amps. The built-in bias meter makes this whole process so simple in any case.
Even with the stock Electro Harmonix EL34's, this thing has tons of power. Indeed I spoke with Steve Leung (his phone number is in the manual) and he strongly recommended that I fit KT150s at some point, which is how he's been rolling his own 299D. The only compromise here would be that the safety cage will not cover the 150's but that's a small price to pay unless you have a listening environment where kids and/or animals are likely to hurt themselves.
Right now I'm very happy with the EL34 sound as it has real balls underpinning the sweetness and delicacy you'd associate with that tube. It's throwing out a ton of ultra controlled bass. I've put in about 50 hours of listening and it has been gradually more impressive, with more to come I'm sure - the mind boggles.
I've never listened to so much digital until now, as this amp transforms my collection, but it also has a very impressive phono stage, despite some comments you'll read with non-owners speculating that it's a cheap and cheerful one. I find it very hard to believe that VPI would compromise too much in that area and, certainly on my set up, it's way better than the Parasound external phono stage I've been using. Not even close.
I'm not a headphone listener, but I do gather that the headphone amp that's built in is giving amazing results.
It's that rare beast of a Swiss Army knife amp without any obvious compromises.
With prices where they're at right now I really don't think you can lose. Even if you didn't like it, which I would be amazed if that was so, you could easily move it on for what you paid, or make a small profit (or arguably a much larger one later on). For me it's a long term keeper and may well be the last amp I ever need. The sound and build quality are certainly in that sort of class.
Good luck and keep us all posted if you decide to pull the trigger.
). The true similarity is clearly in the amp voicing and yet I'd say it's still a very dynamic and modern take on those classic sonic characteristics, thanks in no small measure to what I strongly suspect are pretty identical output transformers and power supply to the Primaluna Dialogue. This affords a boatload of oomph when necessary.