Valve Audio Whisper Phonostage (Silver)

Early last year I ordered some Valve Audio amplification which consisted of a Whisper Phonostage a Black Widow power amp and a Trinity pre-amp.
The man from South Africa had the highest praise bestowed in him when AJ VD Hul ordered a pre-amp and a phonostage.
I have been waiting for my phonostage for a while now and I was given the opportunity to listen to and demo a Whisper in my own system.

I can not recall the last time that a piece of audio equipment drove me to tears, I was totally overcome with emotion and was completely blown away at what I was hearing.
Two stages I have owned at the top my list have been an Audio Synthesis Passion and my current rig of the Graham Slee Reflex Gold/Elevator combo.

I have been exposed to and had in my home a Rhea Asthetix and have listened to some real top end stages from the Manley Steelhead to the super exorbitant ARC reference.

I am not saying it lightly when I say that the Whisper has me speechless.

I thought I would share some pictures of a good friend I have living in Cape Town’s Whisper.

This phonostage allows my Mantis to tread like a fairy and sing like a giant.

Aahhh… Cleansound, my lad – you wax eloquent (and justifiably so, may I add).

Not having had CS’s opportunities for extended listening and only having listened to two Whispers in two settings that were less than ideal (a full-scale audio expo and a separate mini-expo) and systems with which I was not particularly familiar, I will leave the sound quality aspect as described above.

What I would like to add to the comments above are some impressions regarding the engineering of this phono stage.

To my mind there two aspects to engineering that are crucial – design and execution.

Taking the ‘design’ aspect first, a phono stage has to deal with very low signal levels where any electrical noise can very easily swamp the signal and if one considers the bottom-most photo of the rear of the Whisper, it is immediately obvious that Occam’s Razor was employed in the engineering design – the power supply appears to be isolated in its own metal casing (effectively creating a Faraday Cage around this noisy assembly) and each channel of gain/equalisation appears to be similarly isolated. This struck me immediately upon first seeing the unit ‘in the flesh’ as being an extremely elegant and simple solution to a major problem in phono stage design – if the noise and signal are individually isolated, then a low signal-to-noise ratio can be achieved.

Moving on to the ‘execution’ aspect, every single example of VA audio hardware that I’ve had the privilege of inspecting at close range (physically and also via close-up photography) has really impressed the hell out of me with the quality of the ‘build’ (aka ‘execution’).

I can’t comment on the electronic ‘elegance’ of the circuit design (that’s not my field at all) but the build quality is second to none – irrespective of the asking price.

Notwithstanding my opening comments on sound quality and despite the less than ideal listening environments in which I have heard this phono stage, what I did hear was the music coming through ‘loud and clear’ and with a musical integrity that made the experience a real pleasure.

I look forward to an opportunity to listen to another Whisper in an environment more conducive to proper listening and in a system with which I am more familiar and playing music that I know and love…

Us members of the Rainbow Nation are indeed fortunate to have local products such as this one and other excellent offerings that span the gamut from amplification to moving coil cartridges from a small number of dedicated local manufacturers.