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In Memoriam: Vladimir Lamm

In Memoriam: Vladimir Lamm

On April 18th the high-end audio community lost one of its shining lights, a gentle giant who was comfortable in both the solid-state and tube-audio design realms. Born in Lviv, Ukraine, he received an engineering education at the Lviv Polytechnic Institute, which he put to good use, eventually publishing his first hi-fi amplifier circuit in 1978 and making quite a name for himself in the 1980s Soviet Union with some nifty low-distortion solid-state designs. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1987 and, after a short cooperative effort with Madison Fielding, went on to found his own company in 1993. His designs quickly gained a reputation for their innovative engineering and reference-class sound quality. 

In my conversations with him he was always gracious and willing to engage in technical discourse, though eventually he pointed me to a chair and asked me to listen to the music. He felt that electronics expertise was not enough, and that one needed significant musical experience or exposure to live music to create superior audio gear. Over the years, he arrived at a set of subjective sound-quality criteria that informed his amplifier designs. It wasn’t all about conventional distortion measurements but, for example, how an amplifier’s distortion spectrum varied over its power bandwidth.

He was responsible for some terrific amplifier designs such as the ML2.2. To quote from Robert Harley’s review: “What makes the ML2.2 different from other amplifiers— tubed or solid-state, single-ended or push-pull—is a sense of palpable realism and the feeling that music is being brought to life contemporaneously. The ML2.2 doesn’t sound like just a great tubed amplifier, only a little better; it provides a fundamentally different listening experience…. The Lamm ML2.2 surely belongs in the pantheon of the world’s greatest amplifiers—of any price or technology. This amplifier delivers the kind of special listening experience that you must hear for yourself to understand just how special it is—and how it can make other amplifiers, even the most highly regarded tube and solid-state designs, sound somewhat flat and sterile by comparison.” We all miss you, Vladimir. RIP. —Dick Olsher

I first met Vladimir Lamm at Jerry Goldstein’s apartment in New York City back in the mid- 1990s. Jerry owned Vladimir’s electronics, about which I knew nothing at the time, and was a huge fan of his work. It happened that I was then using first-gen versions of Avantgarde’s extremely high-sensitivity spherical-horn-loaded Trio loudspeakers as my references, so single-ended amplifiers were on my mind. Indeed, I’d already listened to and reviewed Gordon Rankin’s wonderful little Cardinal monoblocks, followed by his equally impressive Napoleons, a Unison Research 845 amp from Italy, and several Audio Note SETs (back when Audio Note was exclusively designed by Hiroyasu Kondo and made in Japan). 

The lush timbre of 300B, 211, and 845 output tubes simply beguiled me, and their “directness” set new (or back-to-the-future) standards of grain-free presence, realistic timbre, and lifelike dimensionality. By comparison, even the best push-pull tube amplifiers sounded grainy, thin, and veiled—and solid-state simply wasn’t playing in the same ballpark. 

Of course, directly heated triode amps weren’t perfect. Though their midband tonality was drop-dead gorgeous, they could also be a bit overripe (“Technicolored,” as the saying then went); their extension in the treble and grip in the bass were far from ideal; and their ability to handle “complex” loads (“complex” in this case meaning anything that wasn’t a strict 8–16 ohms, very high in sensitivity, and first order in crossover) was virtually nil. Then Jerry introduced me to Vladimir’s ML2. 

After some unhappy experiences with the press, Vladimir was loath to allow anyone to review his products, but with Jerry’s urging he finally agreed, giving me the opportunity—rare in this or any business—to hear and enjoy a genuine trail-blazing product. 

The ML2 monoblocks only offered up 17Wpc (although single-ended triode watts somehow sounded a lot “stronger” than push-pull ones). Nonetheless, with the Trios and other high efficiency floorstanders, they were more than powerful enough. Functionally and sonically, they were also substantially different—which is to say, better—than the other SETs I’d heard. Of course, in many ways they were nothing like other SETs. For one thing, they didn’t have the same 1930s-vintage output tubes that Rankin and Kondo, for examples, were using. Lamm based his circuit on the latter-day Russian 6C33C triode, and his gain stages were entirely of his own devising, based on a mathematical model of human hearing (which Lamm called “ALS,” “absolute linearity of a system”) that he started developing in graduate school. 

Vladimir didn’t believe in listening as part of the electronics-design process. For him, measurements were the entire ballgame. However, his measurements weren’t referred to contemporary scientific standards (such as the usual THD/IM readings) but to his own mathematical model of how human beings hear. By developing and implementing this unique scientific reference, Vladimir created SET amps that just didn’t sound “single-ended-triode-like.” Instead, they sounded like the real thing—and not just in the midrange, where SETs gloried—but from the bass to the treble. 

Unlike typical 1930s-tech SETs, Vladimir’s ML2 had genuine grip and definition in the lowest octaves and genuine extension, color, and detail in the top ones. Oh, it still had that ineffable “rightness” and richness of timbre in the midband that made SETs so beguiling, but it extended those virtues to the extremes. Moreover, it could handle “complex” loads much more readily than other SETs (though you still had to keep an eye on efficiency). In sum, the ML2 added bandwidth, resolution, functionality, and something very like neutrality (or at least a uniform richness of color) to the midband-centric presentation of classic SETs. I’d never before heard anything quite as lovely or as lifelike as the ML2—and seldom since.

Although his wife Elina and his daughter Esther will continue his work in Lamm Industries’ new and expanded Miami, Florida, facilities, there will never be another Vladimir. In fact, I’m not sure there was ever anyone like him before he came on the scene—a man of science who created a unique mathematical model of human hearing to use as the measurable basis for all high-end-audio designs. 

For the pleasure and insight he gave me and so many other audiophiles, I thank him and wish him and his family lasting peace.                

Tags: IN MEMORIAM

Jonathan Valin

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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