I first heard about the solid-state Soulution 710 about a year ago. This hefty (176 lbs., uncrated), 240Wpc (into 4 ohms) Swiss-made stereo amp had already won a number of prestigious awards in Europe and Japan from magazines that are persnickety. What was more surprising were the superlatives that accompanied the awards. Several of these magazines outright declared it the “best amp EVER,” which was definitely out of editorial character.
Anyway, I did a little research, took a look at Soulution’s Web site (www.soulution-audio.com/english/e_710.html), and was surprised to see Soulution talking about combining the virtues of tubes and transistors. (A hardcore, ultra-high-tech, Mega-Hertz-bandwidth transistor outfit conceding that tubes had virtues that solid-state didn’t was, to say the least, unusual.) Intrigued, I decided to give the stereo amp, the 710, a listen, which is what I’ve been doing over the past two or three months. (I now also have Soulution’s 740 CD player and am expecting its 720 preamp this week or next.)
Since I’ll be spilling the beans about this amp in my review of the MartinLogan CLX (in Issue 190), I might as well just say it here: This is the most transparent transistor amplifier I’ve yet heard. It is to amplifiers precisely what the CLX itself is to transducers–a paragon of fidelity to sources. Unlike the CLX, however, it is not limited in the low end or in ultimate dynamic range. It does what MartinLogan’s great loudspeaker does everywhere. It doesn’t sound darkish and liquid like an MBL or a LAMM amp and it doesn’t sound whitish and brightish like a Spectral or a Boulder. It just doesn’t sound. I’ve never heard a solid-state amp like it, and I’ve heard a few. In fact, I’ve never heard an amp like it. It is so delicately detailed that it can rightly be compared with the very best tubes, and yet it has no tube colorations. It is so fast and clear and unlimited in extension that it can rightly be compared with the very best solid-state, and yet it has not a trace of astingency or grain or bottom-heaviness or top-tippiness. It is the first solid-state amp I’ve ever heard that has made me rethink my bias toward glass audio. It’s so damn realistic (provided, of course, that the recording is realistic).
While I’m not ready to give up tubes quite yet, I’m not willing to give up the Soulution 710 either, which is just a new kind of animal I’ve never heard before. The only other time I’ve had an experience like this one was when I first heard the belt-drive Burmester CD player ten or twelve years ago, which didn’t sound like any other CD player I’d ever listened to and opened up a whole new realm of possiblities. That’s what this amp does. 
I wish I could tell you I knew why the Soulution 710 sounds the way it does (or rather doesn’t sound the way other amps sound). But I don’t know why. Look at its site and you’ll find a good deal about DC to 1MHz bandwidth, short signal paths, error amplifiers, fixed-gain buffers, and current amps with a potential of 200 amp outputs. Some of it is familiar and some of it is mind-boggling. All of its bespeaks a fanatical attentiveness to every element of design. Soulution’s motto is: “Do not add anything, do not omit anything.” I’d say it has come close to making that something more than an advertising slogan.
I’ve been quite irritated by certain other reviewers proclaiming that the sound of Product X or Y can’t be described because it has no signature that the reviewer recognizes (i.e., it doesn’t sound like anything else that came before it). Every product has a signature, but I’ll be damned if I’ve got a handle on the 710’s yet. I’ll work it out over the next few months of listening, but for the time being the best I can do is tell you that it simply sounds like what it is amplifying–like what comes ahead of it, good, bad, or in between. Through things that are themsleves as transparent as the CLX and the AAS Gabriel/Da Vinci ‘table with Da Vinci Grandeeza tonearm and Da Vinci Grandeeza cartridge and Audio Tekne phonostage, it is like peering over the shoulder of the mastering engineer.
Technical Data
Power: 2x120W @ 8 Ohm, 2 x 240W at 4 Ohm, 2x480W at 2 Ohm
Output voltage max.: 31V RMS
Output current max.: 60 A (limited)
Peak Power: 3000W
Input sensitivity: 1.55V RMS
Amplification: +26dB
Frequency response: DC to 1MHz
Slew rate: 330ns
THD: less than 0.0006%
S/N ration: greater than 108dB
Damping factor: greater than 10,000
Imput impedance: 4.7k Ohm (XLR), 10k Ohm (RCA)
Output Impedance: 0.001
Axiss Audio (U.S. Distributor)
17800 South Main Street, Suite 109
Gardena, CA 90248
(310) 329-0187
Price: $40,000
By Jonathan Valin
I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.
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