A *really* good customer of mine is wanting to sell a piece or two of his stuff. He doesn't do audiogon or online forums very much. So I'm doing a bit of consignment work for him. This is the first of two pieces that I'll be selling for him. He gave me the amp, but the manual is still down at his winter house in Florida.
Original owner, he ordered the amp at the dealer about a decade ago and it was shipped directly from the factory in France to him. He put maybe 300 hours on it and then changed his system completely and never used this again. It's been sitting in the box in his closet for years. I know this customer well and believe those numbers implicitly. I opened it up last night and played it for a while... man is this thing sweet sounding with the Harbeth Monitor 40.1s... it meshes really well.
Not an overly full, warm, thick sound. On the contrary, it's got PRAT out the wazoo and is a bit leaner than my Butler stuff. It's *extremely* good at doing delicate things. Voices and plucks of strings are more real than I've heard in a while. Not harsh or brittle sounding at all though... it even balances out and grips the bass driver on the 40.1s such that larger scale orchestral stuff and rock is really good now... I've heard several versions of the YBA integrated amplifiers over the years and this is better than any of those experiences by a country mile.....
I'm looking for more info on this as I'm really not sure how to price it for him. He paid ~$7K for it back then and isn't sure what the original MSRP was. I see a pair of 1 Delta monoblocks on Audiogon for $6500 and a YBA 2 Delta HC for $1495.00. This 1 Delta HC was much more expensive than the 2 and has more power, etc.
Anyone know where to learn more about this? I've done a lot of googling, etc. and can't find much info at all. There was a review of the 1 Alpha HC that this model replaced and from all accounts it was a fairly substantial change from model to model.
In light of the desire for more topics here on AN, I thought I'd get the ball rolling....
