Jaton - Exite Your Senses

This is my 16th, and most expensive, loudspeaker audition. My last loudspeaker review was the $2000 single-driver Supravox Carla towers (seen here). As I learned with the Carlas, such precise positioning opens up a vivid soundscape. There were only two problems with the Carlas. As single driver towers, the Carlas have wonderful mid-range, but they don’t have treble or bass extension. Ok, make that three problems. I also thought they had lots of stiff competition at their $2000 price point.

We know that most loudspeakers require an enormous amount of energy. No, make that most music requires an enormous amount of energy. No, make that most loudspeakers require an enormous amount of energy to make music. An audiophile quality loudspeaker, with a fairly typical 85dB/W/m efficiency, may require less than a watt to reproduce conversational sound pressure levels (SPL) about 10 feet away, yet for brief microseconds musical peaks 30dB higher at full volume can require as much 4000 watts!

We gathered the brotherhood to compare four tube pre-amplifiers against the new solid-state Jaton pre-amplifier. About two dozen tweaking audiophiles of the Suncoast Audiophile Society met in a member's home. An audio club is an ideal alternative to few local dealers and distant trade shows. It allows extended listening sessions with multiple components. All listeners in this shoot-out were middle-age men. Half of the members seem to be doctors. There are 18 audiophile groups in the United States. The listeners used most of Enjoy the Music.com's criteria to mark impressions. See "Our Reviewing Standards page.

Be careful what you wish for? Hardly... I had been waiting for a high end two channel preamp with a built in DAC, bass management, a high end power supply, great internal parts like Wima capacitors, RCA and XLR ports, and a clean solid chassis. When Jaton contacted me regarding the RC2000S and RC20000P, skeptical excitement overcame me.

The Jaton Operetta RC2000P ($1300 USD) is a good suspect for further investigation. It’s built by a company whose mission is to travel “that difficult path between cheap, mass-marketed electronics and the stratospheric costs of status-symbol systems. Simply, we set out to deliver high-performance audio at a reasonable price.