I would respectfully disagree. The hurricane's sound is anything but dry and sterile. It has replaced a single ended amp in my system and delivers a very palpable, warm and liquid sound through Magnepans 1.6s. It has a tremendous presence and a spooky reality on voice, especially. I don't know why it sounds they way it does, as it seems a very straightforward design, but I would love someone to measure it well. I suspect, for example, that it may not have a straight frequency response - the differency between it and the previous amp were dramatic - like a 1-2 db drop in the irritation part of the spectrum - upper midrange, I guess. Usually that means less presence, but in this case it sounds like a lot more. Weird.