stereophile.com n August2019 45steroptphohms. While it may be tempting to
assume that’s why the CV 391 locked
in especially well with the DeVores,
any number of other things could have
played a role—and I hesitate to give
the impression that such specs can be
relied upon to predict synergy. Like all
of the Shindo amps of my experience,
the Montille CV 391 appears to have
been designed for speakers of higher-
than-average efficiency: Disregard
that and you won’t get nearly as much
magic from this amp as I enjoyed in
my home.
And the Montille CV 391 and the
Haut-Brion can indeed sound magical:
both musically and sonically thrilling,
yet with slightly different voices. I’d
own both if I could, but I could live
happily with either—and that distin-
guishes Shindo’s second-least-expen-
sive amplifier as an exceptional value
among artisanal, as opposed to mere
luxury, playback gear.ANOTHER NEW RECORD
One morning last week, my wife
sent a text message that included a
photo she’d taken minutes before of a
shattered LP. It was her copy of Steve
Winwood’s Arc of a Diver, the title song
of which boasts an opaque and mildly
smutty lyric by the late, great Vivian
Stanshall of Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah
Band fame. Indeed, as it turns out,
it was while pulling the inner sleeve
from the jacket in order to read thatThe first thing that
struck me was the
amp’s extraordinary
vividness.By comparison, the Montille CV 391’s
bass output was just a bit excessive—as
on the classic album Play Bach No.1 by
the Jacques Loussier Trio, in which
Pierre Michelot’s double bass was just
a bit too loud and rich and boomed a
bit on one or two notes. But dur-
ing most of my listening to the CV
391, that excess didn’t interfere with
the music—and it usually stayed well
within my personal “a little too much
can be wonderful” range.
During the Montille’s last week in
my home, I swapped out the Altecs
for my DeVore O/93 speakers: less
sensitive by comparison and with
somewhat lower nominal imped-
ance specs (10 ohms vs 16 ohms), yet
nonetheless commendably higher
than average in both respects. Again,
the sheer color, clarity, physicality, and
life of music played through this squat
little amp impressed me all to hell and
back. It played the opening chords
of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5
(“Emperor”), by Clifford Curzon and
Hans Knappertsbusch (Decca/Speak-
ers Corner SXL 2002), just as cleanly
as the identically powered Haut, yet
with greater color and body—and a
little more juice. I spent the next few
days going back and forth between
the two amps with a variety of records
and came to the conclusion that, for
my tastes, the Montille CV 391 was a
slightly better match for the DeVores.
Before the CV 391 went back to
Connecticut, I sated my curiosity by
once again removing its bottom cover,
this time for a close look at the hookup
scheme used for its off-the-shelf Ham-
mond output transformers, whose
multiple windings can be combined
in different ways to create 4, 8, and
16 ohm taps. They were wired for 8LSP-2712), the CV 391 surpassed my
Haut-Brion in terms of both color
saturation and the amp’s seeming abil-
ity to, for lack of a better descriptor,
turn up the contrast knob on everything
passed through it. Paul Bley’s brilliant
piano playing was never before as
explicitly drawn or, again, as colorful as
it was through the CV 391.
On that record, and on The Seldom
Scene’s Live at the Cellar Door (2LPs,
Rebel SLP-1547/48), the Montille CV
391 created an enormous soundfield
populated with similarly large instru-
ments and voices: Mike Aldridge’s
Dobro steamrollered me with every
line. The size of the soundfield put a
dent in my previously held ideas that
an increase in global feedback results
in smaller and often fussier-sounding
spatial performance.
Over my next several days with
the CV 391, I gained a better idea of
its strengths and weaknesses relative
to the other amps I had in house.
Through the Altecs, the Haut-Brion
emerged as having a somewhat better
sense of scale overall; the Haut was
also capable of greater delicacy when
needed, and it sounded a shade righter,
timbrally, on trumpets and singing
voices. And when playing very loud
passages at extravagant volume levels,
the Montille CV 391 clipped less
elegantly, although that happened
only once.
Bass control warrants a special men-
tion: After a few weeks of comparing
the sounds of the two Shindo amps
through those big-woofered Altecs, it
seemed the Haut-Brion offered the
more well-balanced bass, relative to
the volume of sound in the rest of the
audible range. The Haut’s bass was
MONTILLE PHOTO: MATTHEW ROTUNDAalso drier and a little more detailed.