Stereophile – August 2019

NO-INTEREST FINANCING*

NEW VPI

HW-40 Direct

Drive Turntable

$15,000

Now Playing in

Sound Room #1

New
4
0

th

Anniversary Turntable!

LISTENING

I never made note of how the

EL84 tubes were biased in the

original Montille—and a small

amount of global feedback.

This relatively affordable

Shindo uses Hammond rather

than Lundahl output trans-

formers, sharing space with

an enormous Denki mains

transformer. Passive parts in-

clude NOS Sprague coupling

caps and high-quality Cosmo

level potentiometers; build

quality, including the all-steel

casework, finished throughout

in the company’s trademark

shade of green, is superb.

I began my time with the

Montille CV 391 by using it

to drive my Altec Flamencos,

and the first thing that struck

me was its extraordinary vividness. On

the first song I played through it— “All

the Things You Are,” from Sonny

Rollins and Coleman Hawkins’ Sonny

Meets Hawk!(RCA/Classic Records

energized.

Taking a closer look at the Shindo’s

output stage, I found 189V on the

screen grids of the CV 391 tubes—a

little more than 60% of the 301V on

their anodes, suggesting that the tubes

are operated as pentodes. Also interest-

ing is the use of cathode biasing on the

output tubes—I would say this, too, is

a Shindo first in my experience, except

in its first incarnation used

two EL84 pentode tubes per

channel, operated in push-

pull, for a specified output of

15Wpc. The late Ken Shindo

designed the output section

of this newer Montille around

push-pull pairs of British CV

391 tetrode tubes. Today, the

20Wpc Montille CV 391

remains in the Shindo line, its

design having been revised not

long ago by Ken’s son Takashi.

Takashi’s version of the

Montille CV 391 uses one

6AW8A pentode-triode and

one 12AT7 dual-triode per

channel. Like my Shindo

Haut-Brion, also a three-

stage, push-pull amplifier, the

Montille CV 391 has a power

supply built with solid-state rather than

tube rectifiers. But unlike the more

expensive amp, the Montille forgoes

Shindo Labs’ usual practice of using an

internally mounted EY88 diode tube

in line with the center tap of the B+

secondaries of the mains transformer

in their solid-state-rectified amps, as

a means of ramping up plate volt-

age after the tube heaters have been

3 I first wrote about the Shindo Montille in the

August 2007 Stereophile; see stereophile.com/

artdudleylistening/707listen/index.html. That model

endures in the line—at $5495, it is the most affordable

Shindo amp—although it now uses the 6V6 beam-

power pentode as its output tube.