PLINIUS ODEON MULTICHANNEL AMPLIFIER 'WIDESCREEN REVIEW!' By Peter Moncrieff Issue 76 September 2003.As appeared online at widescreenreview.com  INTRODUCTION Let's try a test of your home theatre maturity. You see, most of us were first introduced to home theatre on a diet of action flicks, either by a friend showing off his setup, or by a typical store salesman trying to create in us the most eager-to-buy adrenaline rush in the shortest amount of time. But after we get our own home theatre, then, sooner or later, most of us graduate to other kinds of programs. We come to realize that action flicks constitute merely a small fraction of available films, and we want to enjoy the many other kinds of films that are in the vast majority. The constant adrenaline rush of always being at the edge of our seat loses its novelty and becomes tiring. Many times we want to sit back in our easy chair or couch and relax with a movie, especially after a hard day's work has already stressed and fatigued us. We also come to realize that most action flicks have little to offer in the way of well-written script, character depth, engrossing human emotion, enriching story that expands our horizons, or even dialogue worth paying much attention to. All these wonderful things, with which countless films reward the mature movie fan, are largely missing from action flicks. So we gradually come to realize that there's more to movies than helicopters zooming overhead, machine guns firing from all quadrants, and explosions that suddenly shake the walls. And thus, we also come to realize that the audio for our home theatre should be able to do more than merely play zap and bang sound effects from action flicks. Our home theatre audio must also be able to reproduce, with natural sounding true high fidelity, the music and human voices that rule the soundtracks of the vast predominance of films. The question here is, have you already reached this stage of home theatre maturity? If not, and your viewing is still confined to action flicks, then your audio needs are non-critical, and there are any number of solid-state home theatre amplifiers that will fill your bill. After all, an amplifier doesn't need to be musically accurate in order to play sound effects like the roar of chopper blades or the zap and tizz of machine gun fire. You don't know what the actual helicopter and machine gun sounded like, especially as recorded on the film soundtrack, so you don't have any standard (nor any special requirement) for an amplifier with true high fidelity. Instead, if you compared amplifiers, you'd probably pick the one that gave you the most impressive zap and tizz on sound effects like the machine gun fire. Ironically, the most impressive amplifier on these sound effects, the one with the hardest and brightest zap and tizz, would be one of the least accurate, and it would be one of the worst sounding amplifiers on human voice and on the legato mood music used as background in most non-action films. Naive listeners are often mistakenly impressed by such pseudo "hi-fi" showoff sound. For example, one amplifier from Canada comes to mind that sounds as hard as nails, and likewise another from England that adds a bright, frazzled sizzle in the upper frequencies. Both these amplifiers are very well constructed, and are handsomely packaged, and both have won high praise from other reviewers who aren't as critical (or perhaps as forthright) as we. They would both be very impressive for action flick sound effects like helicopters and machine gun fire, giving you more zap and sizzle than other, more accurate amplifiers do. But both sound awful on music, and on human voice. They make massed strings (so often featured in background mood music) sound horribly, artificially bright, steely, edgy, and sizzly. They make human voice (both for dialogue and for singing) sound thin, hard, etched, and especially painful on vocal sibilants. In short, when it comes to program material that demands some accuracy, both these amplifiers not only sound inaccurate, they also sound ugly and highly fatiguing. If your home theatre viewing is still in the juvenile stage of action flicks, then these flaws won't concern you much, and such solid state amplifiers as these can give your sound effects all the zap and sizzle your ears can stand. On the other hand, if your home theatre viewing has matured beyond action flicks, then PLINIUS Audio's new ODEON home theatre power amplifier is tailor made for you. It comes not from Canada nor England, but rather from another part of the Commonwealth, New Zealand. And, for 23 years, New Zealand has been home to one of the most culturally sophisticated musical sounds made by any solid-state electronics on the planet, the sounds of PLINIUS Audio electronics. The ODEON fits squarely into the tradition of the PLINIUS musical sound and proudly applies that tradition to home theatre, as best as possible within reasonable package size and cost. The PLINIUS sound is among the most musically natural (and is the most tubelike) of any major solid-state brand. It is thoroughly enjoyable, relaxing, and musically enriching. It is supremely effective, among solid-state amplifiers, at aurally transporting you to what the real live music would have sounded like from a typical concert hall seat. And thus, it is supremely effective at helping you to suspend disbelief. That, for most listeners and music lovers, is the ultimate holy grail for an audio system: aurally transporting you to what you remember the live music sounding like, and suspending your disbelief, so that the confines of your room aurally disappear and you are transported to another venue. And that is also the ultimate Holy Grail for the audio part of a home theatre system: suspending your disbelief, making the confines of your room and its contents (the loudspeakers) disappear, and transporting you into the alternative venue of the film locale. Indeed, the best investment you can make in your home theatre is to put most of your budget into the audio portion, not the video portion. We can explore this topic in greater depth another time, but for now two points are worth noting. First, the technology of video equipment and interconnecting standards is evolving very rapidly, so paying a premium price for cutting edge equipment today that tomorrow will be second tier and/or will be cheaper is a less wise investment than allocating most of your home theatre budget for premium audio equipment where the state-of-the-art is much more stable and enduring. Second, unless you have a 360-degree projection setup, no home theatre video, no matter how large the screen, can put you in an alternative venue, where you feel and believe you have been transported to and are surrounded by that alternative venue. The screen showing the alternative venue is only in front of you, and thus the visual part of your brain is still telling you constantly that you are still confined in your small room, looking at a portrayed scene that, no matter how good its fidelity, is still merely in front of you, not all around you. Therefore, you are still stuck here, and you have not been transported there. Your brain cannot suspend disbelief based on the visual field information it receives, no matter how much you invest in your video equipment. On the other hand, the audio field from your home theatre does surround you. If you invest well and wisely in the audio equipment for your home theatre, you can achieve a believable illusion that convinces the aural part of your brain that you are no longer confined in your small room, but instead have indeed been transported to another venue, the venue that is visually portrayed only in front of you. Thus, while you sit enjoying the film, it is the aural part of your brain that is actually doing the most important work, constantly feeding you the unconscious information that subliminally convinces you that you are there, not here. You unconsciously believe, thanks to the aural part of your brain (not the visual), and that's when the magic happens. Of course, to make this magic happen convincingly, you need a high-quality audio system that convincingly portrays the surround soundfield, so that you are not aware of artifices in your room with you, artifices that aurally would remind your brain that you are still trapped in the confines of your small room with loudspeakers only a few feet away hemming you in from all sides. To achieve this high-quality, the audio equipment must have excellent imaging (so that you cannot detect the loudspeaker locations), and it must sound natural, so that the voices, music, and atmospheric surround effects from the soundtrack sound as if they are coming from the real things in that alternative venue you want to feel transported to, rather than from an artificial sounding audio system in your small room. A typical solid-state amplifier can (for example) make soundtrack music sound annoyingly screechy and dialogue sibilants strident. When your ear/brain hears these artificiality the illusion is destroyed, since your brain is suddenly made aware that you are back in your small room, surrounded by an artificial sounding audio system. The magic of believing you are in the film venue is lost and gone. Thus, it's crucial to invest in audio equipment good enough to reproduce all these sounds naturally, rather than with artifice. The PLINIUS electronics excel at portraying all these sounds naturally, without the solid state artifacts common to most other solid-state electronics (typically glare, hardness, lean sterility, etc.). The PLINIUS sound particularly excels at music and at the human voice, which are two of the most critically demanding types of sounds to reproduce so that they seem natural, live, and real, instead of artificially reproduced. The circuitry of PLINIUS electronics has a proud heritage of excellence in achieving this naturalness for stereo systems, and now the new ODEON brings a version of this same circuitry to home theatre power amplifiers. The PLINIUS Sound Let's take a minute to analyze the components of the PLINIUS sound, to see why it is so effective at sounding natural. Starting at the bottom of the spectrum, bass is full and powerful. Woofer control is very good, aided by the amplifier's high current capability, but the bass sound is not dry, tight, and lean as with some other solid-state power amplifiers. This bass fullness actually helps musical naturalness, because it provides a more consistent, full foundation for the rich warmth region immediately above. The rich warmth region is one of the stars of PLINIUS' musical naturalness. In our parents' day, they shopped for large radio consoles by listening for what they called "good tone," instead of a small, tinny sound. Well, they were not as naive as you might think. For what they really meant by good tone was rich warmth. A rich warmth region gives a full, natural body to the sound of many musical instruments and human voices, so you can clearly hear the large wooden sounding board of a grand piano, the fat body cavity of a double bass, the body chest cavity of a singer. In contrast, most solid-state amplifiers sound too lean and sterile in the warmth region. Without enough warmth, most solid-state amplifiers short-change the piano's wooden sounding board, so that the bright, steely clang of a piano's steel strings is overemphasized (and then is further overemphasized by being rendered too hard by a typical solid-state amplifier's glare in the upper midrange). Without enough warmth, most solid-state amplifiers short-change an acoustic guitar's large, rich sounding wooden body and cavity, literally making the guitar sound like a much smaller toy guitar. Without enough warmth, most solid-state amplifiers short-change the body cavity chest sounds of a natural human voice (both singing and speaking dialogue), so that you only hear the sound of the person's vocal cords, and thus that person doesn't have a real bodily presence, so you don't really believe they're there in front of you. The rich warmth of the PLINIUS sound gives a palpable believability to all music and all voices. It's even effective in heightening the drama of films. When James Earl Jones gets angry or plays a villain, his palpable bodily presence from the PLINIUS' rich warmth subliminally sets your psyche quaking in its boots. In the upper midrange, most solid-state amplifiers sound too bright-and also are at their worst in glazing over the sound by adding an artificial hard glare that sounds ugly, and is fatiguing, and actually obscures true musical information. The PLINIUS sound is very different. At its best, the PLINIUS sound refuses to add artificial glare so typical of solid-state, and it is slightly polite or recessed in the upper midrange. This upper midrange politeness puts music at a slightly greater distance, and this actually helps musical naturalness and believability. Why? Most music and most voices are typically recorded with too close miking by recording engineers. This too close miking emphasizes the upper midrange, and you would hear this upper midrange emphasis if, when you hear live music, you could sit as close to the musicians as these recording microphones were placed. But the sound of live music that you, in fact, hear from the much greater distance of a typical audience seat at a concert hall sounds very different, especially in terms of having much less upper midrange energy. So the sound that you remember hearing from real live music and singers has less upper midrange energy than the sound put on recordings and film soundtracks by the typical too close miking of recording engineers. Of course, what you want, for reproduced music to sound convincingly believable, so you can suspend disbelief and be aurally transported to the concert hall or to the film venue, is a sound that accurately reproduces what you remember hearing live from your distant concert hall seat, not the different and artificial seeming brighter sound that the too close recording microphones picked up. Thus, by being slightly polite in the upper midrange, the PLINIUS sound transforms the artificial, unrecognizable sound of typically too closely miked recordings into an accurate reproduction of the natural and believable sound of real live music that you know and remember from your concert going experiences. The PLINIUS sound has obviously been carefully engineered into the PLINIUS circuitry by musically sensitive people who know the natural sound of live music, and who know how to achieve this sound by deliberate circuit design. Note that the PLINIUS sound, by deviating from academically literal accuracy in the reproduction of the input signal from the too close recording microphone, winds up being more accurate-more pragmatically accurate to your knowledge and memory of the sound of live music as you heard it from your more distant concert hall seat. And that's what counts in the end for most of you, because that's what makes reproduction convincing and believable, allowing you to suspend disbelief and be transported out of the confines of your small room and into an alternative venue. In the trebles, the PLINIUS sound consistently continues this same theme. Its trebles are noticeably gentle, delicate, sweet, soft, and slightly defocused, with a gradual Gaussian rolloff of progressively higher treble frequencies (the highest treble frequencies are still there, and sound properly fast and extended, but they are more subdued in quantity and more gentle in nature). Again, this is actually consistent with what you would hear from real live music when sitting at a distant concert hall seat. Thus, the PLINIUS sound again gives you an accurate reproduction of the sound you know and remember hearing as the natural sound of live music. Note that this makes the PLINIUS sound's trebles musically consistent with its upper midrange, since both work consistently together to accurately reproduce what live music sounds like at a distance, by mimicking what happens to live music heard from a typical listening seat distance. The rich warmth, polite upper midrange, and gentle trebles all work together, to make the PLINIUS sound a consistent and convincing portrayal of the natural sound of music and voice, heard at natural and typical listening distances. It's a minor miracle that an electronic circuit can so well emulate and mimic the acoustic phenomena in a concert hall that alter and deliver the sound of live music you know so well. It's a major miracle when that electronic circuit is a solid state circuit without tubes. Indeed, the PLINIUS sound is very tubelike, more tubelike than probably any other solid-state amplifier. It even brings a nice touch of liquidity to music, as good tube amplifiers do. But, of course, the PLINIUS also gives you all the practical advantages of solid-state: no tubes to wear down or replace, higher current output, higher power output in a given space, better bass control, etc. And the PLINIUS' high frequencies, gentle though they be, are still faster, more extended, cleaner, and more articulate than many tube amplifiers out there (especially designs transplanted from rock concert PA to home theatre), some of which have trebles that are too rounded, slow, dull, and even smudged, grungy and/or distorted. The differences are easy to hear on musical attack transients, for example a guitar pluck with a hard pick, or a hit on a triangle. The direct live sound in the near field, as recorded by a close up microphone, sounds like a "ting," with a hard "t" attack. The PLINIUS sound makes this attack softer and sweeter, so it sounds like a "ding," which is just like it would sound live when heard from the typical distance of an audience seat. And then some tube amplifiers that are too rounded and dull in the trebles would alter this "ting" too far, changing it into a "bing" (note how the "b" sound is even duller and more rounded than the "d" sound, which in turn is softer than the "t" attack sound). The PLINIUS sound is immensely enjoyable, relaxing, and seductive. Time after time, when comparing the PLINIUS to other amplifiers on many diverse cuts of music recordings, we found ourselves seduced into simply enjoying the music, and listening longer to the same cut when we were listening through the PLINIUS than when we were listening through another amplifier. That in itself is probably the ultimate testimonial, right there. That's what you want for the sound of any system you hope to enjoy, be it for music or for home theatre: a sound that you just want to keep listening to. In the interest of forthright objectivity, we have to note that, as seductive and subjectively enjoyable as the PLINIUS sound is in creating a musically natural sound, it is not as objectively accurate to the input signal as some of the best competing amplifiers. Objectively, it is, for example, easy to hear that the best of the competing amplifiers have better articulation and delineation of individual treble details than the PLINIUS (for instance, one of our lab reference amplifiers, the superb Clayton, individuates upper frequency musical details better than the PLINIUS with its gentle defocus). So the PLINIUS sound is ideal for your enjoyment of very natural and realistic musical and voice sound, for both film soundtracks and music recordings. But for home theatre it will not give you the sharpest zap and sizzle on those machine gun sound effects in those action flicks, nor for stereo or surround music listening will it give you the ultimate in sharply etched analytical detail. Of course, most music lovers do not want to be constantly assaulted by every analytical detail that a typically too close recording microphone picks up, and instead they prefer to hear the musically natural sound that they hear from live music when sitting at their usual audience distance in a concert hall, the same musically natural sound that the PLINIUS sound delivers so well. Likewise, after you have outgrown the juvenile phase of home theatre, where you were naively impressed by every action flick zap sounding as sharp as possible, and when you have matured to films that feature realistic music and dialogue, then you'll be joining the majority who want all this music and voice to sound as naturally realistic as possible, which again the PLINIUS sound delivers so well. SPECIAL ADVANTAGES FOR HOME THEATRE For use in music systems, the PLINIUS sound already has an advantage over other solid-state amplifiers, because it executes so well its subtle tubelike transformation of too closely miked recordings into a more natural, more enjoyable semblance of the live music sound you actually heard from your concert hall seat. Then, when applied to home theatre systems, this PLINIUS advantage actually grows and becomes of even greater benefit. How? Consider the following. Music is very important to most films, helping to move the story along and helping to magnify the effect upon you of the other elements of film language: the dialogue, the cinematography, the actors' facial expressions, etc. Indeed, music can be so important that it is sometimes the only element responsible for changing the course of the whole story plot and for effecting radical turnabouts in your perceptions, attitudes, and emotions. As a simplified example, consider a still cinema shot of a tranquil woodsy landscape with no characters in sight, and tranquil music playing; suddenly the music turns menacing and suspenseful, and just as suddenly you know that the whole plot has turned, with a likely murderer hiding behind one of those trees. But movie music does its crucial work amidst a curious paradox. It may be a key ingredient of the film, and it may be crucial to manipulating you the audience, but it is supposed to do all this important work subliminally, without you being aware that you are being manipulated, or even being aware that the music per se is even present at all. Your conscious attention is supposed to remain focused on the film, the story, the characters, etc. And (in most cases) if the music is doing its job well, you're not supposed to consciously notice the music changing, the music changing you, nor even that there is music playing at all. If you consciously notice the manipulator and the manipulation, then you won't be as emotionally moved. Now, many solid-state amplifiers, with their typical glare in the upper frequencies, impose artifices on music, especially on massed strings that are so often used for background music. When the massed violins acquire an artificial screech, what should have been subliminal background music grabs your conscious attention, thereby undermining the whole crucial mission of music that is supposed to move you without your consciously noticing. To make matters worse, this artificial screech also distracts you from the film, offendingly annoys you, fatigues you instead of relaxing you, and ruins the whole suspension of disbelief and magic transport to the film venue, since you are now painfully aware that you are merely in a room with an artificial reproduction system screeching at you. Here's where the PLINIUS sound comes to the rescue. Its musically natural reproduction assures that massed violins don't screech or offend or sound artificial. The music on the soundtrack stays where it should and does what it should. If the music's intended role is subliminal background, then it does not call undue conscious attention to itself by sounding artificial. If on the other hand the music's role is active, as in a concert video, then the PLINIUS sound still reveals the music as it should sound, as you would expect live music to sound, from a typical audience seat. Furthermore, it's no secret that the equipment chain employed to prepare and deliver film soundtracks to you can be of poorer sonic quality than that employed to master stereo music recordings. The film soundtrack chain might well employ more and poorer IC chips, compressors, and reverb units, all of which could contribute to music sounding less natural and more artificial (especially in solid state ways) on film soundtracks than on high quality stereo or surround music recordings. Thus, even a hypothetically perfectly neutral solid-state amplifier would reveal these ugly, distracting, and fatiguing artifices contaminating the music (and also the naturalness of dialogue) on many film soundtracks. But the PLINIUS sound would gently work to counteract these artifices imposed on film soundtracks, especially where inferior IC chips impose solid-state artifices on voices and music by leaning out their natural warmth and adding upper frequency glare. We saw above how the PLINIUS sound gently corrected the artifices of typical too close miking, to produce a natural sound that more closely reproduces the sound of live music you actually hear from a more distant typical concert hall seat. In much the same way, the PLINIUS sound (with its rich warmth and polite upper midrange counteracting the leanness and upper midrange glare from IC chips) can likewise gently correct for the artifices imposed by inferior solid-state circuitry earlier in the signal chain, since these artifices are generally similar to the sonic "artifices" imposed by too close miking. Thus, the PLINIUS sound can be of extra special advantage in a home theatre application, helping to compensate for the limitations in many film soundtracks, and thereby helping them to sound more natural, more realistic, more enjoyable, and more effective in emotionally moving you to a more rewarding cinema experience. The ODEON's Share Of The PLINIUS Sound The virtues of the PLINIUS sound have already been well established for a number of years in PLINIUS' lineup of stereo power amplifiers, line sections, phono preamplifiers, and integrated amplifiers; all two-channel units intended for music systems. The highest end power amplifiers in today's PLINIUS lineup include the mighty SA-250, a monster (156 pounds) 200-watt-per-channel class A stereo amplifier, and the more recent SA-102, which, although rated at only 100 watts per channel class A, incorporates PLINIUS' latest design refinements, and therefore, reputedly offers even better sonics (more refined upper frequencies) within its power capability than the older SA-250. These two premium power amplifiers exemplify the PLINIUS sound at its best. Now, the challenge for PLINIUS, as it is for every manufacturer developing a premium quality home theatre power amplifier from their best stereo power amplifiers, is to try to shoehorn five or six channels into the same general type of single chassis that in their stereo amplifier only had to support two channels, while sacrificing as little as possible of the premium sonics that make the two channel model sound so great, all within constraints of reasonable package size, weight, and cost. You can tell that the ODEON is a no compromise home theatre effort even before you listen to its sound. The impressive bulk of this amplifier (23 inches deep x 18 inches wide x 10 inches high), housed in a handsomely sculpted case, already tells you that the ODEON means serious business. Its 120-pound weight, about as heavy as they could make it without breaking your back, testifies to the massiveness of the innards that are needed to make a great sounding power amplifier (two crucial keys to mighty sound, the power supply and the output stage heat sinks, are both heavy, so the weight of a power amplifier tells you that the manufacturer has not skimped on these key factors). The ODEON is not inexpensive, which again tells you that the manufacturer has not skimped on the insides. Even the specs tell you that the ODEON is a heavyweight assault on premium home theatre sound. The rated power of 200 watts per channel matches that of PLINIUS' most powerful two-channel amplifier, the SA-250. Note that the ODEON puts six of these 200-watt channels on one chassis, and gives you these six channels of PLINIUS sound at a relative bargain price ($10,995, far less than three SA-250's would cost you at $9,995 apiece). A quick note on channel configuration. The ODEON's amplifying channels are contained in removable modules, so there is considerable flexibility in configuring this amplifier to your application. There are six bays for six modules, and you don't have to fill up all the bays. Furthermore, each bay can contain a mono 200-watt module, or a stereo 100-watt-per-channel module. Thus, you can configure the ODEON to have anywhere from one channel, to the conventional home theatre five channels, to seven channels for a 7.1 home theatre setup (assuming a self-powered subwoofer), or up to 12 channels maximum. Note however that the 100-watt-per-channel stereo module has lower current capability as well as lower power capability, so it is recommended only for auxiliary channels that will carry only ambience information and not much direct sound energy (e.g. rear or overhead ambience channels for a seven-channel system). The ODEON's USA price is $10,995 equipped with your choice of six modules (the 100-watt stereo and 200-watt mono modules cost the same). The modules are priced at a very reasonable $600 each, so if you want only five channels, deduct $600 from the $10,995 figure. Clearly the ODEON is a very special home theatre effort, and better than most home theatre amplifiers from other manufacturers, which are heavily compromised relative to their two-channel premium stereo siblings. The most amazing feat of the ODEON is that, in some ways, far from being a home theatre compromise, it actually outperforms the premium stereo amplifiers in PLINIUS' lineup. That's because each channel of the ODEON contains circuitry essentially identical to a channel of the SA-102, which as noted sounds slightly better than the older SA-250 circuitry. But the SA-102 only puts out 100 watts per channel, which might be somewhat limiting for some home theatre demands. Thus, in the ODEON, this better sounding SA-102 circuitry has been boosted to 200 watts per channel, as much power as in the SA-250. In effect, the ODEON gives you the best of both worlds, the better sounding circuitry of the newer SA-102, plus the double muscle of the SA-250's 200 watts per channel. So now let's ask the big question. Just how good does the ODEON sound? How much of the PLINIUS sound, already famously established by PLINIUS' premium stereo products, does this home theatre amplifier deliver? Well, it depends. You see, you have some choices about how you want to use the ODEON. And your choices will determine just how good the ODEON sounds. At its best, the ODEON is a glorious paradigm of the PLINIUS sound, supreme in its musical naturalness and thrilling in the way it involves you. At its worst, the ODEON sounds disappointingly like many other solid state amplifiers, with some artificial glare that sounds obnoxious in its own right and that also blocks, clogs, and obscures musically natural details. How should you use the ODEON, in order to hear it at its best? And what should you not do, in order to avoid hearing it at its worst? A product with the perfectionist aspirations and potential of the ODEON deserves more than the causal plug in and play listening report that you see in most reviews. We wanted to probe deeply, to learn about all aspects of this amplifier's performance, and ferret out the very best it could do. So we spent a lot of time and effort, researching and analyzing and isolating the variables that made this amplifier sound better or worse. We finally managed to coax magnificent musical performance out of this creature. And now we can advise you what to do, in order to enjoy it at its magnificent best. Here is a distillation of what we learned in our research. Here are your keys to hearing the magic from this amplifier.
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