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Full Circle

Octave mastermind Andreas Hofmann is always good for a surprise. Now the

obsessively perfectionist audio nerd has, en passant, revolutionised the
single-ended design. And created a sensational amplifier.

fter all, we don’t know der what audio demon got into from its notorious shortco- liest days of electrical enginee-
Awhat pushed him to take A. Hofmann. Did he fall for the mings, hitherto carved in stone. ring, i. e. the 1910s and 1920s,
this decision. Because normally single-ended virus? Or purchase The result, to come straight to when people had just started
A. Hofmann swears by his own horn-loaded loudspeakers? the point, is nothing short of an exploring the properties of the
principles. And these would ac- acoustical sensation. newly developed electronic val-
tually prohibit him to even think None of those things is true. ve. Within a surprisingly short
about single-ended valve amps. On the contrary, Andreas Hof- The single-ended amplifier period of time, the most brilliant
mann had an idea. More pre- is the world’s oldest amp de- heads of that epoch managed to
Way too little output power, cisely: an idea which can be sign. In fact the very first, to be cast the physics of those valves
barely acceptable distortions used to free the single-ender precise. It dates back to the ear- into figures and formulas
and an HF frequency response
similar to that of a rotary phone.
And let’s not forget the hardly A lot of little electronic
tolerable hum and, to make helpers organise and protect
things worse, a bass roll-off the puristic valve technology
which – in the eyes of a perfec- in the signal path, which is
tionist – is nothing but a disas- designed around the
ter. So the bottom line would affordable, robust KT120
be a definitive no-go for Octave. workhorse.
Because Octave valve ampli-
fiers must be demonstrably as
perfect as their builder is known
to tick.

And now look at this: a sin-
gle-ended headphone amp
which is also an integrated am-
plifier. Sure, only with the usu-
al 8 to 12 single-ended watts,
but this will do, provided you’ve
got the right loudspeakers. Or
the “wrong“, technically very
incorrect headphones, whose
operation would actually requi-
re the power of a toaster. All
this is no problem for the brand-
new Octave V 16 Single Ended,
which even reduces the famili-
ar Octave look to absurdity, co-
ming along as a chunky portrait
format cube with a felt 20 kilo-
grammes. So we may now won-

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