I have to admit that I have written a few pieces of writing about my experiences with YO186 but I withhold to post it as I do not know if it might valuable for anybody. It looks like no one use YO186 on West. There are very few who use YO186 in Russia, Bulgaria and Poland (a handful people) but I do have contact with them.
I kind of finished my amp and calibrated it for YO186 and I still fence sitting about my opinion regarding this tube. It is a good tube, a good representative of RE-604 class but it has own immensely interesting character. It has extremely good bass and stunning lower MF, in the rest it is similar to RE-604. However, it has own amassing dark and gloomy character and own very unique dismal color palette. It is difficult to get it and it is difficult to understand the uniqueness of YO186 palette. It took for me for a while to get it and to appreciate it.
The YO186 is not wild-color-type of tube and it is not flashy. It has what I call the “wildness of desert colors” where colors are submissive and reserved but they have different qualities. Those colors do not strike by wild saturation but rather by richness of own identity and there is own beautiful in this. It is like you did not have any food for 5 days and then you have a single bite of an apple. The richness of that single bite and it meaning would create more reaction in your head then a 92 ounce sirloin steak during your normal feasting time. Then there is the subject of quality of that …. apple.
The quality of that apple and the quality of YO186 tone is a very interesting subject. In terms or food the people I hate the most are French. Those French motherfukers have soil in their county with some kind unique combinations of minerals that allow fruit grown in that soil to taste like nothing else in the world. I like to celebrate obesity and I like food. I remember when I first time visited France I was walking from airport to my hotel and stopped by in a tiny, family-own, relatively dirty corner grocery shop to ask a direction. Suddenly I was attracted by some strange smell. I was walling around the shop chasing the smell and end up at a pile of regular, not particularly fresh in my view grape. Just for curiosity I took one piece and put in my mouth. It hard to explain what happen next but that grape exploded in my mouth with a force of 50 megaton nuclear device. I never thought that it is possible, my jaws were paradise and I did not know what to do next… It was not even the richness of the colors that stroke me but it was a completely different relationship between sense of taste expectations of what taste might do to my sensations- collecting soil. The YO186 tone in the way the same, let me to explain.
When we expect “tone” we expect a certain esthetic impact that is of cause a subjects of our amplitude of perceptions and the amplitude of message. However, we look into the things slightly deeper then we can recognize that there is a “primary esthetic impact” and the “aftershock”. In association with sound I call it “esthetic fundamental” and “esthetic harmonics”. The “esthetic harmonics” are the reverberations of initial tonal impact of our perception after the tone have collapsed. The YO186 does not go overly wild in the “esthetic fundamentals” but in the shadows of those fundamentals, when mind is cooling down from initial acquaintance with tone, is the area where the YO186 shines.
The YO186 is in my view is superb second violin tube, the way how it fills the harmonic gaps is very interesting. It has own tonal signature of downcasted colors, but the colors subdued bit but adding white to originals colors but rather by adding water to the colors. So, the colors are submissive but still intense and have own passionate drama in them and very own class of expressiveness. This all make YO186 to be on dark, almost melancholic and sorrowful side. Thinks about Pathétiqu’s Adagio Lamentoso. But here, in dark, is where the YO186 is able to fill Sound with a firework of “little shinny things”, sort of discovering life at the bottom of Mariana Trench …
Do not be under impression that YO186 is ONLY “darky” tube. It you pump into YO186 initially gray sound then YO186 like a prism would throw out zillion shades of gray. But when I stick into YO186 very colorful Sound, perhaps a bit overly colorful then YO186 demonstrates a fantastic pyrotechnic of capacities.
A week or so ago I told that I play much more vinyl then before. The interesting part is that I do not like to play nowadays any other cartridge then my Ortofone Jubilee. The Jubilee is superbly colorful son of bitch and I think it is exactly what YO186 craves.
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Last night I pulled from my shelves that host the “Best Recordings Ever” my favorite Lutoslawski cello concerto. The Lutoslawski cello concerto is like a drug trip but in this performance if is something even better. It is Japanese EMI pressing with the composer himself conducting the Orchestre de Paris in 1974 with Rostropovich leading. The performance is nothing short of insane and the sound is phenomenal. The Lutoslawski concerto as some other contemporary cello works is played on “decayed” cello. Here is where the YO186’s “million darn shadows” go absolutely feral. But it needed to be played initially with “esthetic fundamental” – cable front end. I feel the Ortofone Jubilee, it a good “match”. You need to hear my Siegfried Palm’s Records (thanks, el`Ol) to recognize where the YO186 runs the show…. |