Grandinote Shinai integrated amplifier
I was doing my press beat for Stereophile in the hallway of Montreal’s 2019 Audiofest when I glimpsed something that stopped me in my tracks. It was a marketing slogan, across the room on importer/exhibitor Goerner Audio’s floorstanding banner: “Tubes or semiconductors? Magneto-solid technology amplifies emotions.”
Intrigued and with pen and paper in hand, I settled into one of the listening chairs and soaked in the smooth, luscious, musical sound coming from a system with the Grandinote Shinai integrated amplifier at its core—and wondered: tubes or transistors? The line was blurry.
I’d never heard of Grandinote, whose electronics have an unobtrusive, elegant look that sets them apart from the typical fare. The man helming the room—Goerner Audio’s amiable Reinhard Goerner—clued me in. Designed and manufactured in Italy, Grandinote products are exported to 32 countries. The Shinai is a special breed of integrated: a solid-state amplifier that uses a tube-based circuit.
I have since heard Grandinote products demoed at two other shows. At the last of these, Toronto’s 2019 Audiofest, the Grandinote integrated was being fed music files from a Grandinote server, feeding in turn the unusual, sensitive, crossoverless Grandinote Mach 9 loudspeakers. I wrote, “My journalistic objectivity be darned! The Goerner Audio/Grandinote room produced the sort of sound that melts my heart, ravishes my senses, and reminds me of why great hi-fi is worth the money.”
Max Magri
Grandinote founder and product designer Massimiliano Magri—Max to his friends—grew up in a small town in northern Italy’s Lombardy region in the province of Pavia, whose namesake capital city, in 452 CE, was sacked by Attila the Hun.
As a child, Magri told me, he played a game where he tied links of string between pieces of furniture to simulate an electrical circuit. A few years later, he had earned a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Pavia, less than an hour’s drive from Milan, and had built his first amplifier, a tubed unit that featured his first output transformer. Output transformers became one of Magri’s fascinations.
In time, he decided it’s the most critical part in an amplifier, because of how hard it is to build a really good one and because it’s the interface between the amplifier and the speaker. I asked him if that meant that it was the most critical part, soundwise. His answer: Context matters. Design matters. “It’s stupid to think that the best output transformer is the secret sauce. It’s like the guys who buy the most expensive drivers and think they make the best speakers. Both the drivers in the speaker, and the output transformer in the amplifier, need to work for a specific project.”
Magri’s studies of output transformers would be the foundation for his invention, at age 29, of “Magnetosolid technology,” a portmanteau of “ferromagnetic” and “solid-state.” The invention led to a transformer made to work with a tubed circuit, minus the tubes, that could deliver the high bandwidth, low impedance, and bass solidity of a solid-state circuit but also the rich tone tube designs are known for. That richness, he was convinced, was due not to the tubes themselves but to tube circuits that abide by the same simpler-is-better ethic that informs the design of the Grandinote Shinai.
The Shinai
The Shinai is an integrated, push-pull, dual-mono amplifier specified to deliver 37Wpc into both 4 and 8 ohm loads, entirely in class-A.
How dual mono is it? It is so dual mono that a power cord is needed for each channel. Ba-da-tish!
The stylish, flat-surfaced front panel has no protruding toggles or knobs—just a symmetric array of seven pushbuttons: three on the left for inputs and programming, three on the right for volume setting, and a big one in the middle, at the bottom, to power the unit on and off.
Negative feedback? “As long as I am Grandinote boss,” Magri said, “feedback will be prohibited like sincerity in politics.” He is proud of the Shinai’s low impedance and high damping factor—the highest in the world, he claims, for an amplifier that uses no negative feedback. It’s a feat he credits for delivering what his company’s website describes as “control in the bass frequencies that tubes can’t dream!!!”
The Shinai is fully balanced, although two of its four (line-level) inputs are single-ended, with RCA connectors. Each of its four direct-coupled stages uses two transistors, and—get this—each transistor has its own power supply. (How many power supplies does the Shinai have? It depends on how you count. There are two power cords and two transformers—one for each channel. Each transformer has five secondaries. Those 10 secondaries feed 32 circuits, each with its own energy storage, filtering, and regulation.) This configuration “is very important for the three-dimensionality of the sound and the location of every instrument in space,” Magri said.
The Shinai’s 16-page manual is written in the same charming, occasionally frustrating Anglo-Italian dialect found on Grandinote’s website. You must visit the website to download it; it isn’t in the box. What is in the box is a sleek, solid-billet aluminum remote control handset. Plus the amplifier itself, and two power cords.
Setup
I substituted the Shinai for an Antique Sound Lab mono amp at the top of my rack. I connected two sets of RCA cables—one from my phono stage, the other from my DAC. The Shinai was connected via two power cords—I used LessLoss DFPCs—to my Shunyata Venom 8 power conditioner, which itself was connected to a dedicated 20A electrical line via a Shunyata Research Black Mamba CX power cord.
The Shinai drove, alternately, the recently reviewed Totem Skylights, my KEF LS50s, and a pair of mystery speakers I’ll get to later.
Listening
I started with an album that, as I later learned, Reinhard and I both routinely use to set up speakers: Roger Waters’s Amused to Death (CD, Columbia CK 47127). It was mixed using QSound’s “3D binaural” technology, which generates two-channel audio with 3D effects from multiple mike feeds. Get the imaging right, and the rest falls into place.
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COMPANY INFO
Grandinote S.R.L.S.
North American distributor: Goerner Audio
91 18th Ave.
Deux-Montagnes, Quebec, J7R 4A6, Canada
(514) 833-1977
goerneraudio.com
ARTICLE CONTENTS
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Specifications
Associated Equipment
Measurements
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