Audio Note P4 Monoblocks

To my mild surprise, I have found an amp system that seems even better with my Avantgarde Duos than my Audio Note P4s (at least in their current, original, configuration) and it could be available. That would mean selling the P4s so here they are.

[/URL][/IMG]

I bought these from a member of another specialist Audio forum in mid 2011. He had only recently bought them from Dave at HiFi Guy, but found they were not a good match for his Wilsons. I have a copy of the original web ad, which said “this is an almost new pair directly from Audio Note and have not even been played once”. The new list was quoted as £11k; that made me think they might be P4 silvers. I checked with AN who pretty much confirmed the history: while they were not really almost new, they had been taken as a trade-in from the original owner, who was trading-up, and they had been checked-over, refurbished, re-valved and then passed on for re-sale. I think, however, they are standard P4s, so the mid 2011 retail would actually have been £9,675. They have the “John Player Special” fascias (i.e. black and gold, which could of course be changed if you prefer) and overall they are virtually mint (although the silver speaker binding posts could do with a polish). I can supply or post further photos if wanted.

They came with Audio Note valves, but are now running on Sophia Electrics300Bs, which are more expensive- but much better in IMHO. All the other valves are as supplied by AN and the AN 300Bs are also included, so you could have them as spares or sell them.

They come in Audio Note boxes which were obviously new in 2011 and are as I received them. I only have a pdf of the manual.

In case you are not familiar with these amps, the current P4s are balanced and cost over £21k in 2011, but mine are not balanced. I’m told you can still order this model, but it is not listed on AN’s site. The nearest listed equivalent are the Conquest monos, but, while both amps are parallel, single-ended monos (not push-pull) and hence can produce about 16 watts each, there are a number of significant differences:

· The P4s are bigger 220(H) x 460 (W) x 530 (D) mm each compared to 195 (H) x 205(W) x 500(D) for the Conquests and, at 30kg (each), they are also 50% heavier than the Conquests. Hence, you’ll need a fairly large rack and a strong back! They also need more power than the Conquests, so they’ll probably warm up your room a little more. (The CD case in the rear-view picture will give you an idea of size)

· The P4s have an attenuator at the input and Audio Note say this means you can run them as one-source integrateds. If you really wanted to do this it would probably be a good idea to have the attenuator pots replaced with the AudioNote stepped attenuators, since otherwise you would have to balance them by ear each time you changed volume! I found the pots to be very useful to set the amps up to take the output directly from my CDP and I then adjust volume over a limited range using the CDP’s volume control. However, I suspect most people would choose to use them with a pre -the obvious match being an AN M3 or M5 (OB1's M8 sounded very good with them, but is a bit over the top pricewise!). The advantage of the input attenuators is then that you can set them so that he volume control on the pre can operate over its entire range rather than risking being restricted to a small range with sensitive speakers.

· There must be some differences in the design as the P4s use 7 valves per monoblock compared to 4 in each Conquest. I alsounderstand the PSUs and output TXs of the P4s are different (bigger, better) from those in the Conquests.

They are obviously designed for reasonably sensitive speakers, but at 16w you are not limited to horns such as my Duos. I’d be happy to answer any questions in the thread or by private message. Obviously I’d be more than happy to demo them here (Cambridge) and I could possibly bring them to you to try if you live fairly close, but I’d need to negotiate the use of SWMBO’s soft-roader as there’s not a hope I could get them in my car. Although I have not posted on this forum in a while, you can find me HiFi Wigwam and EBay (as a buyer only on EBay) with a very similar user name in both cases.

I’m looking for £5k with both sets of 300Bs