World Premiere Review by Noam Bronstein New Valve Order (NVO) is a small firm in Cyprus, making world-class tube electronics by hand for the audiophile market. The company is the vision of Andreas Hadjiminas, whose lifelong passion has been tube amplification. Panikos Kontemeniotis is Andreas’ right-hand man, handling worldwide sales and communication. NVO’s phono preamps have already received rave reviews, and the company has now introduced Special Edition (SE) versions of their SPA One and SPA Two phono preamps. The 13-tube SPA One SE is the focus of this review. An overview of specs and features can be viewed in the first attachment: Retail price is set at $5950 USD. Although it comes in at about 60% of its’ big brother’s cost, US distributor Steven Klein (Sounds of Silence) informs me that the SPA One SE compares very closely with the SPA Two SE. This is really an all-out preamp, with no holds barred and only a few concessions to cost considerations (when compared with the SPA Two SE). For a description of the SPA One SE circuit, Andreas provided me with the following: “Tubes 2 & 3 are stage 1, left and right, tube 4 is stage 2, tubes [...]
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