THE THRAX ARES AMPLIFIER/DAC

We are approaching the year and a half mark since we began with Thrax Audio as a main choice of electronics. In terms of growing a new brand in a country and building traction that isn’t very long at all so I’ve been pleased with how well things have started so far. Last month alone (June 2023) we sold three Enyo amplifiers and one paired with a Maximinus DAC for a complete 2 box Thrax system. This month, two Ares so far both for use with external sources. We also have just taken delivery of the new Sirens bookshelf speakers which will be the subject of another article very soon, they really are quite something.

Thrax tends to spark feverish interest from customers. Individual optics, superb metalwork, unique internal designs and fantastic sonic performance at lower price points that what you might expect. Although its flagship Libra preamp and Spartacus amplifiers are sonic equals of the Tidal Prisma and Ferios, Thrax can be engaged with at a much lower price point than Tidal and is a different type of sound too; a touch more articulate and up on its toes and remarkably dimensional. More commonly though in the environs of Walton on Thames, it is viewed more as an alternative to Vitus; the same natural organic sound but one that is a degree more dynamic, enthusiastic and resolving vis a vis the more elegant and velvety Danish presentation.

Whilst over 50% of our customers are buying Tidal Audio, our next largest demographic is probably at the budget end, customers who are upgrading perhaps from a traditionally British Linn or Naim system or some other competent “mid fi” brand like Mcintosh, Hegel, Luxman, Levinson, Rowland, Accuphase, Chord etc. and they want something superior, which exudes the same desirability and ethos as the premium gear at Lotus. Truly high end in sound but simple in form factor with minimal clutter and still relatively affordable. We are building a lot of these systems then and they usually comprise an integrated amplifier with in inbuilt DAC/Streamer, a smattering of upgrades to improve  the home network for Qobuz, a good single mains lead and then the very best set of speakers and speaker cables that budget will allow. A carefully curated system of this type will always beat a system with bigger and better boxes but poorer or indeed careless ancillaries and setup. It is a format that we specialise in and to the uninitiated, it’s usually quite a surprise just how good these minimalistic rigs of ours sound. We have this down to a fine art and our recent partnership with surely Hemingway cables will further strengthen our hand again. Do not underestimate the importance of really special ancillaries and how they can turn basic boxes into something genuinely magical.

Last year we looked at the Thrax Enyo vacuum tube integrated in the blogs and discussed in greater depth the advantages of the Integrated amplifier ethos in that particular article so head over there for further discussion on this if necessary. I am a little late in posting this follow up about its solid state brother but in the interim, I did commission Hifi Plus magazine to review the Ares and they duly obliged a few month ago. You can read Jason Kennedy’s article from this link here. According to Thrax – and its something that we have started to mirror here – the Enyo outsells the Ares but Thrax still manufacture both because they do things a little differently and the choice really depends on the customer, his listening tastes and music and room. There is no single right answer.

First the specification. The Ares is a very compact unit. Very solid and heavy and fashioned from 2 huge beautifully machined hunks of aluminium which mate together to create a modern, slimline and tasteful looking unit. Apart from the choice of 8 and 4 ohm speaker connections that only the Enyo sports, the Ares has exactly the same connectivity at the rear and the same controls and menu system. It is also now produced in mk2 form the same as the Enyo, after a debut round of various upgrades for both the input and digital boards in 2022.

At the rear we have the IEC mains input and this happily includes its own master power switch. I am a big fan of these, a very secure way of knowing that the power is truly off and no one ever has to pull a plug out of the wall to completely disconnect the unit. Looking at the inputs we have a single ended RCA input plus ground screw that feeds the onboard MM/MC phono stage, two further single ended analogue RCA inputs, one balanced XLR input, followed by no less than 6 digital inputs if the onboard DAC is specified: Bluetooth, LAN/ethernet, coax SPDIF, Toslink optical, AES/EBU and USB. The DAC is based on the flagship Maximinus R2R ladder Dac, 32-bit/768kHz and DSD256 via USB and with similar tonal rendition and dynamic ability but obviously at one tenth the cost. It lives as a separate module inside so is ready to happily accept new technologies and upgrades as they are developed. The bundled network streamer supports DNLA, Roon, Tidal and DSD and is also software upgradeable. Mconnect Lite is easy and provides fast access to Qobuz, Tidal, and any music files on the home Network although it should be stressed that it is not the greatest app there is. Roon is vastly superior to use or one can always employ a separate streamer connected by USB or AES/Coax. The Ares is also airplay ready so very easy to play the likes of Spotify, YouTube, Bandcamp, Beatport etc.

On the amp stage the Ares is made from two true mono amplifiers, fully balanced with independent regulated power supplies. It is rated as 200W into 4 ohms, 120W into 4. The single ended driver uses a regulated power supply and the output uses a proprietary sliding bias technology with no transistor switching, meaning Class A like liquidity and a very natural sonic fingerprint but without the extortionate heat levels of true Class A moving through that sumptuous aluminium chassis. The preamplifier section is obviously a crucial part of the amplifier’s high performance and it is the same as featured in the Enyo integrated, a fully differential signal path with transformer isolation for the RCA inputs and dedicated separate power supplies for analogue and digital, both separate from the power amplifiers.

The onboard menu system contains options for balance control, MC loading (100,132,200,390 ohms), Phase inversion, MM/MC phono switching, display brightness control, display dimming function and a standby function. And there is also a remote control programming section and like the Vitus RI-101, the Ares thankfully uses the nifty slimline apple remote to good effect. The TFT display is large and very readable and fronted by a satisfyingly thick chunk of perspex, and whilst the touch sensitive keys are unusual and perhaps an acquired taste, I find they work positively in practice and grew to like them fairly quickly. They of course add significantly to the clean minimal looks.

Build criticisms ? Well it is a little crowded back there perhaps and the L&R channel designation of the XLR’s sockets does not follow the lower (R) and upper (L) pattern of the RCA sockets but then this is a very neat compact amplifier so it’s a very small penalty to endure. The speaker connectors are probably the one element that I am not too keen on. They work well enough but the clamping end of the terminals possess a protruding key way to slot into the gap formed by a spade connector to presumably give a more secure fixing but in practice I find it just frustrates and gets in the way and in the case of certain cables, prevents them from going around the terminal more then they otherwise could.

“From the first few minutes it was clear that this is an excellent amplifier. The sound it produces being solid yet nimble and full of spatial information. Everything you play has a strong sense of depth … it’s there on a lot more recordings that often seems to be the case. It is an unusually transparent amplifier regardless of whether the signal goes into the line inputs or the USB”  Jason Kennedy, Hifi+ magazine

For this article I reacquainted myself with the Ares for a good week of listening and compared back to my resident Enyo and Vitus RI-101 with all amplifiers nice and warm. I performed two customer demos of all 3 amps over this time as well and have also just spent quite a lot of time with all 3 units this spring and summer so it’s been a good moment to sit down and put all these findings to paper. A lot of my listening this past week was using each amp’s bundled DAC module connected straight to the internet but it must be clearly stated from the outset that the findings below are really exactly the same if you bypass the inbuilt DACs and use a separate higher quality digital source; the described differences just become more obvious. I used mostly the flagship Thrax Maximinus and the new Kalista Dreamplay XC for this function and for speakers I used a combination of the Vimberg Amea standmounts, the wonderful newly released Avalon PM2.2 and the new Thrax Sirens bookshelf.

If you have already read my report on the valve based Enyo, then you will have some idea what to expect from the Ares and it will be helpful here to contrast back to that amplifier, and also to the Vitus integrateds covered elsewhere on my blogs, to quickly illustrate the Ares experience. Customers who have experienced the Thrax sound here at Lotus will immediately know its core tenets. Extreme transparency, a very high degree of “thereness”, strong liquidity and dynamics and strong on imaging too. Any Thrax system pops into the room and sounds very open and vivid, but natural, effortless and completely devoid of any sense of electronics or an electronic process.

The Ares then sounds extremely transparent from the word go, the sort of openness that most of us associate with very expensive high end equipment. Whilst the Vitus RI has a very stable, grippy and punchier bottom end and a supremely elegant and reserved treble, and the Enyo a slight sweetness of tone and a relaxation in its musical structure, and the SIA-025 a smooth buttery bloomy rendition and ripened saturation of tone, with the Ares there is an immediate sense that very little is being manipulated, added or subtracted and that it is most definitely the most true amplifier out of the four.

Although solid state and very obviously pure and neutral sounding, it is never clinical or traditionally staccato or biting but does have superb definition and precision. Edges and spaces between notes are a touch more taught than they are on the Enyo and more defined than the Vitus RI-101 as well. Leading edge and pronunciation is beautifully judged, you sit up and notice this amp and listen and there is nothing remotely vague or half hearted about it. With that sliding bias design It also has superb liquidity and flow between successive notes to counterbalance its precision. Beats and rhythms and the transitions of detail are portrayed with very natural articulation and tightness.

What you really hear initially then is the amplifiers supreme sense of naturalness. In a decent setup it really does sound invisible, certainly the most inaudible and “not there” out of Enyo, RI-101mk2 and SIA-025. It’s a clear untainted open window in all metrics, especially the architecture of the sound and the way it times. Music seems to hang together in the most untouched or unmanipulated manner with exactly the right balance of grip, flow and edge. All your tracks are neither hurried or forced in pacing nor languid and lazy. But then the Ares also has superb precision on fast rhythmical music without ever becoming “machine gun” or choppy in the way many transistor amps can become …. a common non-tonal colouration that really can spoil the suspension of disbelief.

For me the Ares’s very natural form of precision and timing is standout. The resolution is  there, lots and lots of it I might add, more than many expensive pre and powers as Jason Kennedy found out, but it never exists as a sort of autopsy or examination of the sound, it is just there naturally, hanging in space and within the perfectly judged momentum and structure that the Ares manages to faithfully telegraph.

This is an amp which is also very spacious sounding but accurately spacious too. It will be one of the very first things you notice. I feel like the space within the music is almost as capacious as the Enyo except it feels a little more rigid and linear and devoid of any of that curvaceousness or sinewy feeling you get with valve amps. Perhaps the Enyo finds a little more atmosphere and ambience on certain recordings and the perception of space is slightly more pronounced but the Ares is exemplary too and certainly sounds quite a bit wider and roomier than the RI-101, with images being quite a lot more affixed in correct position as opposed to the Vitus’s more homogenous and delocalised delivery.

Ares tonality is also dead neutral; the solo piano test it passes with flying colours and there isn’t a hint of bloom or lift anywhere in the spectrum and no perceived added richness. The Enyo is extremely neutral for a valve amplifier but in contrast does possess a smidge of warmth in the lower registers and some very fine ripening on the harmonics of notes, and the RI-101 similarly has a degree of warmth or density in the upper bass in part because of its more measured treble response. The SIA-025 is warmer again and richer too, almost burnished at times in terms of textures and timbres but then this is why people love this particular amplifier so much. If the harmonics and lustres of the music are a small notch sweeter on the Enyo, they are a few percent more grainless and true on the Ares. Swings and roundabouts.

What about dynamics, energy shifts and drive ? Well, the Ares as stated has invisibility at its core so it is very dynamic as you would expect with such a low noise floor. In a good wideband system large macro shifts in energy, big transients and crescendos do not have the amp hardening or running out of transparency, separation or beauty of tone. In this respect it is as impactful and adept as the Enyo but perhaps with a little less smoothness and a touch more definition. What the amplifier does not have though is that extra degree of punch and bottom end weight of the Vitus RI-101.

What is has in spades is dynamics of the micro kind, the intrinsic pressure behind individual notes, sounds, voices and instruments. Microdynamics are crucial to the life of the music, the system sounding vivid and present. An amplifier that disappoints in this area will probably be one that needs aggressive or forceful components elsewhere in the system to make a good sound and will possibly sound a little bland or flat sounding without. This is a system that could have you constantly reaching to turn the volume up as well, not a good sign. Strong microdynamics on the other hand, means a system that sounds stimulating and alive even at very low volumes late at night. When a customer tells me that he’s been tending to listen at lower volumes since he purchased from me, it always puts a smile on my face; it’s conversely a very good sign. All Thrax equipment has very strong microdynamic potential and inner energy and that would even include the Yatrus turntable as well. On the Ares it is almost like subtly applying the emboss filter in photoshop or switching on a small back light to the entire musical landscape. Every single sound has power and physical shape and is specially presented to you with its own strength and vigour. Granulated sugar rather than castor. It is what we partially mean when we say that the sound “pops”.

So to summarise then, the Ares is the most invisible and natural integrated I can show you. The Enyo is a degree more casual and sweet and hugely melodic, and arguably a strong performer in a more modest system because it’s tubed fingerprint gives it an innate boost of realism and beauty to the instruments even if the system is not good enough yet to fully resolve that realism for itself, and it possibly sounds more spacious and 3d when cabling and mains is of lower quality. But the lower noise and better the system, the more the Ares can flex its purity and invisibility and in many respects it begins to marginally outperform the Enyo. Focus and definition versus smooth and curvaceous, grainless and pure versus concentrated and euphonic.

The comparison back to the Vitus RI is more complex and the differences are only really clearly elucidated when you perform meticulous AB listening one after another. It is a different family of amplifier designed in a different way. Compared to the Ares, it feels slightly more contrived or the more “constructed” sound. The Ares sounds so inconspicuous, so naturally ‘high end’ and existing almost unaware of itself, that it makes the Vitus sound as if it’s trying hard to please and do all the right things. The Ares is wider and more spacious with more accurate image placement and the outlines are more pronounced. The Vitus is more of a traditional AB powerhouse with a more condensed and slightly more reserved sound with a degree less overall clarity, but with superb control, punch and drive. Again, the choice will largely depend on music tastes and the target system and future system trajectory.

Playing more studio based electronic music like rap and R&B and less well recorded compressed rock and pop, the powerful punchy bass of the RI and its slightly more boisterous character in the bottom end pays handsome dividends leaving the Ares sounding slightly flatter and less engaging, almost too linear for the job at hand. The Vitus’s more homogenised, grippier and more reserved performance may be the very reasons for its selection. It always sounds beautiful, extra refined if you like, and always reassured and unflappable. So arguably it is a little easier to place in a system, a tonic maybe for a more modest system that could use a bit of extra oomph or could use some protection in the top end, or one that has to transition over the next few years with some more mediocre speakers and cabling and mains.

But if you are on the path to assembling a high end system of the greatest calibre, with good expenditure throughout from network to mains to wires cables and supports, then the Ares has many advantages as being the central spine of such a setup. Last year when we began with Thrax, the Enyo was an immediate favourite of mine, truly compelling and joyful to listen to, but this year I have done this triptych demo over a dozens times for customers and each time you learn something new with a different person and different music in the room. The Ares has grown on me exponentially and I have gradually learnt it charms and strengths and if I had to pick myself maybe I would now reach for it more times than I did any of the others. It is a remarkable choice for  a lot of my type of music …. acoustic, jazz, more restful material, female vocals, electronica.

Yes, really … it can replace 6 boxes.

Before we finish though I must emphasise very clearly that every single customer who has made this comparison concluded that we were sampling three of the best wines one could taste – or words to that effect – the differences between them were only apparent because they were compared quickly in tandem in a very open setup, and that they would most likely be more than overjoyed if they had to live with any one of them. I have and will continue to create incredible sounding systems from all of them.

The new Zcore  Hemingway cables I used for much of the demo worked incredibly well with the Vitus. Transformative is the word. They make the music feel more specially presented and more focused with greater precision and timing. The Ri lapped all of these properties up to great effect. In short, the Hemingways played very synergistically to the areas in which the Vitus was less than excellent.  Using the Tara Labs ONE cables on the Vitus was arguably equally as compelling but for different reasons which might be more pertinent in a different sort of setup. The sound was more homogenised and rounder but grander, more dense and slightly larger. Race prepared Lotus Exige versus grand touring V12 Ferrari.

The Tara Labs Muse mains cable needs a special mention. This is new to the UK and for me, is preferable to the more expensive Tidal mains cable in a non-Tidal system – which is saying something. Like all Tara it is astonishingly balanced and inaudible. In this test it was more even-handed and linear than the Shunyata Sigma with more definition and sense of detail to the Sigma’s more rounded, warm and enveloping signature. It felt more invisible and had a touch more resolution and fidelity but then it is a little more expensive. It would depend of course on all the components elsewhere as any system is a complete organism with so many interdependent parts, but with Avalon speakers I much preferred the Tara Muse on the Vitus especially how it banished any trace of softness. The Shunyata Sigma however was more convincing on the Ares, introducing just a few percent of warmth and smoothness into the mix and a trace splash of dynamic spice. With Thrax speakers or possibly Rockport (and certainly Tidal), the Ares would probably also favour the Tara if the cables and rest of the mains were of a similarly high standard.

The new-ish Shunyata Typhon 2 was used throughout all listening. It remains another astonishing product. Take it out after extended use and everything suddenly sounds chaotic, tinny and over excited ! A relative comparison of course but still descriptively accurate. I did an AB of the Typhon in a complete Tidal system the other day; what it brought to a £250,000 system (just feeding the Ferios monoblocks) was truly staggering given that it represents just 2% expenditure of the entire spend.

Stillpoints Ultra 6. I used these under all amplifiers in all tests. Customers already know what I think of these, an amazing product under almost anything. Yes they are expensive but the extra resolution, air, calmness, naturalness they introduce is so difficult to live without once heard. Tungsten Groove footers would also be another viable option for use under the Thrax (probably not the Vitus) giving a darker but richer and more controlled sound but I did not have them to hand and wanted to keep footers the same throughout.

I connected up the Rockport Atria II early on, one of my favourite speakers, but for the most part used Vimberg Amea stand mounts and the newly released Thrax Sirens and Avalon PM2.2. I am a huge huge fan of all of these speakers and really they all worked well with all amplifiers. No unexpected mismatches. The Sirens are a tiny  £10,500 bookshelf and really shocked me just how transparent and see through they are. I will write about them soon, they are quite astonishing and despite the size and lower price, have the ability to create a deeply impressive high end sound. As for the revised Avalon PM2, they are just so easy to fall in love with. Comfort food, or like meeting your oldest friend for a catchup in a cosy pub. Unlike the mk1 PM2, these new versions present like a bigger better PM1. You feel so comfortable with them from the from the word go. They are an ‘every man’ high end transducer, a respectable size that’s easy to accomodate and will win many many hearts; they do everything in spades and the expansive holographic panorama they create is traditional Avalon in every sense of the word. I can bathe in them for hours and hours, hugely expressive and immersive.