One of the most interesting rooms in the Athens 2014 show was without doubt the Jadis, paired with Genesis 5.3 speakers. These speakers have the looks of being somewhere in between the insensible and the un-drivable but looks can be deceiving… In fact the three 8inch aluminum woofers are servo-controlled by a 500 Watts bass amplifier and this places the 5.3 among the top full range tube friendly speakers in the market. This means that the magnificent Jadis SE845 single ended triode amplifier had to handle only the mid and high frequency units, a task much easier for the 20 Watts of output. Scot reviewed these speakers for Part Time Audiophile so I will focus on the electronics and Jadis as a company a bit more.
The rest of the system included the JPS-2 preamplifier with external power supply unit and the Jadis JD3 Evolution CD player also connected to an external power supply base. Cables were Siltech and rack Finite Elemente’s Pagoda Master Reference Heavy Duty.
We heard Kimber Manning singing “What A Wonderful World” and I could not agree more; what a wonderful world it is when the Genesis dipoles get driven by quality triode watts. Her voice had a sense of flow and transparency; piano notes emerged from a dark background with no flaw whatsoever. Not sure how the system would perform on big scale symphonic pieces, maybe a bit more power would help in those.
Interestingly Jean Christophe Calmettes, head of R&D of Jadis, was attending the show so I could not skip the opportunity to ask him a few questions. First was his favorite Jadis amplifier and he replied the 845Nec push-pull amplifier, which in my book would have been an even better match for the Genesis speakers. Then we talked about digital audio and Jadis seems not to be so convinced about DSD. He made the example of HDCD and a few other formats that never really took off. They will wait and see how things evolve before jumping on the DSD wagon.
Additionally they are only planning to produce DACs and no streamers for now, though they do recognize that in some point in the future streamers will be kings. Future plans include amplifiers in push-pull configuration with the newly introduced Tung Sol KT150 beam tetrode tube. Sounds like a lot of meat cooking for Jadis who already has one of the widest propositions in the audio market.
