MONOBLOCK TUBE POWER AMPLIFIER
When I was a young man, blind dates were always laced with anxiety. (Proms were even worse. Once, when I arrived in a rented tux and my father’s prized dress gloves, my date’s father ordered me to take out the trash.)
More than half a century later, blind dates—now with review equipment—remain fraught. Sure, expectations and the frisson of unknowns heighten the experience, but if it isn’t a good match, I’m stuck for the duration of our time together. If a component sounds so mediocre that I can’t be sure what’s on a recording, the review and my joy are compromised. When music’s emotion and beauty remain locked within cascading successions of bits or tightening spirals of grooves, it feels as though once again I’ve been sent out into the cold.
I first discovered Octave’s towering Jubilee Mono SE monoblock ($80,000/pair) at AXPONA 2022, in the listening room sponsored by Dynaudio of America. In that first encounter, I found the sound so disappointing that I hesitated to accept an offer to review it. When I later learned that this poor showing was related to an unfortunate—indeed tragic—event, I promised to return once the setup was complete. When I did return, the next day, the transformation was dramatic. That system delivered “captivating beauty … with all the soundstage depth, air, and expanse one could hope for,” I wrote in my AXPONA 2022 show report. (See bit.ly/3uv7PTv.) “Beauty without bounds.”
“I want to see this singer in front of me with the whole body and the whole emotion.”
I promptly said yes to the review. Then, mere days after Dynaudio of America President Michael (Mike) Manousselis visited my home to help install the Mono SEs, I was off to Munich High End. There, I heard the monoblocks for a second time, with a different front end and loudspeakers. “Timbres sounded extremely natural and inviting on vocal and chamber music by Claude Debussy,” I wrote in my May issue review. “The sound [was] all that I could ask for. … [C]olors and depiction of space were stellar.” I was eager to return home, finish writing my show reports, and start listening to the Octaves.
Octave’s history and designs
Founder, owner, and designer Andreas Hofmann dates Octave’s beginning to 1968, when his father, a specialist in transformers
