New H20 Signature S250


After reaading a lot of reviews about these amps, i emailed Henry to build me (2) S250 to biamp my speakers, I have an immediate response from him and this is what he say:

Hi Patrick,

The Amps are the Signature Stereo which has an addional Big Toroidal
transfomrer which makes it a true dual mono design, for $300 more which
makes the amp now $2800. Of course, The amp is improved over the
regular stereo across the whole Audio Spectrum. If you want the regular
version stereo, let me know.

Thanks for the number and I'll try to give you a call sometime today.

Henry

Does anyone yet owned this amp?
rneclps
I leave my Tacts and H2O's on all the time. However, this time last year a lightning strike did take out the midrange and tweeter ribbons of my Apogee Divas with a colossal POW. This was prior to me using the Ultimate outlets or P600. The amps were connected directly to the ribbons with no intervening passive x-over components. The H2O's can and will source a butt load of current.

I will soon get the power supply upgrade for the TCS. It's from the same guy that sold me the amps.

I did another round of listening with both OEM's amps (3 Tact and H2O Sigs, tri-amping my Apogee Studio Grands) using various power conditioning configurations. The results were similar to what I got before, that being the Tact 2150 is MUCH more sensitive to power conditioning and cords than the H2O. Plugged straight into the wall I much preferred the H2O, but like I said before, I really need to try a quality digital interconnect to be fair and any recommendations for a 2.5 to 3.0 M interconnect that's reasonable in price would be appreciated. Surprisingly the best bang for the buck by far were the high current Ultimate Outlets. They gave me basically the same improvement as going into the P600 for the H2O (which was a "moderate" improvement) and no or very little further improvement was had when that combination was plugged into the P600. So the H2O's are no longer plugged into the P600,which means I can play load as hell now....if I want to.

I had basically the same experience with plugging the Tact amps into the Ultimate outlets except the improvement was considerable, taking the amp from unacceptable to excellent. There was further improvement by plugging them into the P600 as long as the volume levels were moderate. The overall improvement was rather dramatic.

However, for each comparison the basic differences between each amp remained: While they were tonal clones of each other, the main differences were in openness,boogie and bass control with the H2O S250 Sig coming out on top. However, I DO need to feed the Tact amps a more uptown digital signal and their x-over functions are to die for if you're into bi & triamping like me.

his has been a significant finding for me as I originally prefered the Tact amps overall to the standard S250 when being fed power by the Ultimate Outlet P600 combination. If you have a standard S250, I really, really suggest you get it upgraded to the Signature configuration. This is just a flat out great amp.

Jeff
Jeff - nice detail on both the Tact and H2O regarding power conditioning. Currently my Sig. S250 is plugged straight into the wall socket and powered down after each listening session. I'd like to try out an Ultimate Outlet or even their UPC-200 with the zones running parallel mode. That way, I could leave it powered up, protected from the powerline nasties.
Jeff- until you get an upgrade PSU in your TCS and do some very basic upgrades to your 2150s, you have have no idea what the TacT units can do. FYI- the best power conditioners I've found for digital equipment are the RSA
units.
I lived with the S-250 for 6 months. Now, they are coming back as the Sigs.

I have an SET/300B based system and a Threshold S-500 amp. Sinced I shipped my H2O, I do not have the urge to listen to music anymore.

I miss my amp!
My amp is back! Now it is the Signature S-250.
My oh my, what a big improvement!

Happy listening