LOTUS SUGGESTED SYSTEMS #7

The reasons behind Suggested System are numerous. Firstly to continue talking about Soulnote who are still relatively new to Lotus but already having a huge impact, secondly to quickly introduce the amazing new Joseph Loudspeakers to you, thirdly to illustrate very clearly the wonderful synergy between Soulnote and Joseph, and finally to showcase a vinyl system for a change, something that we do specialise in, despite the fact that the vast majority of people these days want systems built around Qobuz and Tidal.

First an important note to preface some of the components here. Technology moves so rapidly in this industry and in addition, the traditional rigid framework of huge prices for high end equipment seems to be slowly eroding away. Components like the Soulnote E2, A3 and Joseph Perspectives you see here have extraordinary ability when you contemplate products that were launched only just 5 or 10 years ago.

Even in our own back catalogue of former class leaders – Integrated amps like the original Vitus RI-100 that we sold so many of, the previous generation Allnic phonostages whether that be the H1202, H1500 or H3000, Avalon Idea and Transcendant floorstanders – the A3, E2 and Josephs featured in this system are a whole galaxy better than those components of yesteryear. There is almost no relation or similarity. To think that we very successfully upgraded dozens and dozens of Naim 500 customers into those older components but this system here has ability that those older setups wouldn’t even hint at. The leap is unimaginable.

UK Soulnote Importers Kog Audio recently performed an AB comparison of the mk1 version of the E2 against a £30,000 Zanden phono preamp and whilst the Japanese unit was not comprehensively victorious, it certainly held its own, at just 22% of the price. I had a similar experience here against a £17,000 Allnic phono.

The Joseph’s demonstrate the exact same credentials; in similar fashion to the Thrax speakers, in the sub £20,000 region they represent a whole new ball game in terms of transparency, naturalness, speed and dynamics, and their ability to completely disappear from the room. They possess the same aspirations and sonic philosophy as the much more expensive ultra high end speakers we sell from Rockport and Tidal. This kind of neutrality, balance and invisibility is essentially the same sonic place you get to if you have an almost unlimited budget to spend.

As dealers we are on a journey of discovery exactly the same as our customers and every few years certain instructive items come along which educate us and have the power to alter the way we see our entire shop. The Josephs and the Soulnote E2 and A3 have been just that, products which have been an inspiration and education even to a seasoned dealer such as myself, someone who has listened to an awful lot of kit over the years, sold many or even most popular things secondhand at one point or other, and dedicates a large amount of time every year exploring new and rival product.

Time to get into it then. Let’s look at each component in detail before talking about how this system actually sounds.

The handsome Brinkmann Taurus is one of the older components here but still one of our favourites and certainly our chosen Brinkmann vinyl spinner. We wrote about it very recently comparing it to our other big seller in this price range the Thrax Yatrus.

The direct drive Taurus is probably one notch down from the world’s mega decks with telephone number price tags. You could get it closer by upgrading the tonearm (a high level Primary Control or the Supatrac Nighthawk) and a fancy isolation/support system (Absolute Points or Seismeon Reactio 2) but the Brinkmann tonearm works so well as a package and keeps the overall cost sensible.

For cartridges, the Taurus has such high performance that the sky is the limit really, as high as the new £14,400 MySonic Labs Diamond if you have the means. For this system though we elected to feature the popular £3760 MSL Eminent EX. This is MySonic’s entry MC but still beginning at a high level of ability and roughly comparable to the well known Lyra Kleos SL. We love it for its superlative neutrality and honesty, it is a fine performer that never prods for an upgrade.

Soulnote include two versions of 3 metal feet with the E2 V2, a set with flat bottoms and a set with spikes. In this setup we actually elected to install the unit onto a set of HifiStay Hardpoint Trinia isolation footers. These are one level down from the amazing Absolute Point footers we do so well with, so a welcome lower cost option for customers. The build is still the usual high quality we have come to expect from HifiStay and we very much like the way they naturally upgrade the performance of the stage with greater air, float and fluidity. The price, £1600, is more in keeping with the cost of the box too.

The E2 phono stage has already sold by the bucketload and elicited some deeply impressive reviews, forum comments and impressions worldwide – the exhaustive exploration by Ken Kessler being a good case in point. But I want to tell you that the A3 Integrated from the flagship 3 series is another rising Lotus Superstar and has been winning a fair few hearts ever since we took delivery of our demo late last year.

As regular readers will know, we build a lot of systems around Integrated amplfiers. Until a system has been expertly furnished with very good mains, cables and isolation equipment and then an exemplary source and pair of speakers, pre/power or monos is simply not necessary and actually a waste a lot of the time. New customers visiting our demo room are often floored by what our range of Integrated amplfiers can do when setup well with powerful noise reducing ancillaries.

In point of fact, when I was finished exploring the setup you see here I happened to substitute in Hemingway’s flagship £38,000 Omega XLR interconnect between phono and amp. Yes I know the price is absurd and some people won’t like this but let me tell you that what it did was extraordinary and everyone in the room scratched their heads as to why a simple 1.5m wire could do what it did. The sonic improvement was greater than if we had swapped the A3 integrated for the Preamp and Mono Amps featured in the last Suggested system which would have cost more money as an upgrade. Yes you read that correct, a single XLR cable that does more than an upgrade from Integrated to preamp and mono amps. More on this later though in a dedicated article but suffice to say here that system ancillaries are where a lot of the magic is, as long as those ancillaries are truly special of course. Most of the cables and mains products sold in the UK aren’t though, they are generally sold because they are a lazy pick, well known mainstream brands with a very attractive profit margin.

The A3 at £18,900 sits slightly above the Vitus RI-101 Integrated in price and a good chunk higher than the formidable Thrax units the Ares and vacuum tube Enyo. The Class A Vitus SIA-025 is more money again but then that amplifier is now bought more for flavour and presentational style rather than out and out top speed. The A3 though has been the pick for many customers this year, just as long as they didn’t require an inbuilt DAC because that is something the Soulnote does not do. As a pure amplifier though, it takes first class honours with ease. This is a finely tuned machine which proficiently honours all the important aspects of the music.

The A3 is effortlessly transparent and detailed and like all Soulnote, very adept in creating a three dimensional and liquid rendition of the music. The amplifier is fast with superb agility and toe tapping appeal. Much like the Tidal house sound, the A3 feels as neutral and as see through as you would ever wish for with very impressive levels of precision and information retrieval but at the same time manages to flow unostentatiously with sweetness and ease. Edges seem perfectly judged as does the apportioning of frequencies from top to bottom. The amplifier also never feels over tight as so many solid state designs do. The house sound then is a very well judged balance which aces all aspects of the sound, and happily avoids both the analytical and romantic camps that many amplifiers seem to fall into.

Soulnote amplification like we saw in Suggested System 6, is a perfect recipe for effortlessly building an exemplary system. High neutrality and invisibility and a distinct lack of personality or character. The sound will never stray into any nasties – sterility, softness, over tightness, over sharpness, dryness, smear or lack of speed. The A3 just gets on with the job of amplifying whatever it is fed with. Simply add the best source, speakers and ancillaries.

Ohhh the Josephs …. where to begin ? Well, if you have any interest at all in a sub £20,000 compact floorstander then you simply have to come and have a listen to these. You are in for a wonderful, delightful surprise. If you are familiar with many of the popular offerings in the UK and that’s your sonic baseline, from the likes of PMC, B&W, Kudos, ATC, Spendor, Focal, Wilson Benesch etc., then your jaw might just slacken a little as you pick out your favourite tracks. Not just for the incredible sound, but the modest price and then the tiny weeny size of the things.

Let me put it this way. The Josephs are like the ultra high end speakers we sell from Rockport and Tidal that start at £40,000. Not much else that I have ever heard at this price level is. Sonically they have the same philosophy and strive to produce the same results. This is how you do it.

What is that you ask ? Well it’s a rare combination of things but it starts with the invisibility of the speaker, the speaker disappearing completely from the minds eye and animating a huge three dimensional soundscape in the listening room which sounds exactly like what is on the CD or the source. Now you might think that many speakers do that but relative to the highest levels of sound quality in this industry, they don’t. Very few speakers alter the sound by such a small amount and manage to get every last ounce of it out of the cabinet and physical into the room in a natural believable way. Even many of the expensive ones that do, still often sound too clinical, sterile, tight, mechanical or ‘hifi’ in some way. It’s not just about good imaging and 3d, the sound has to be tonally and structurally believeable or else you hear a piece of hifi in the room.

As I write, the Josephs Pearls at the Warsaw hifi show were just given best sound of the show. The little Pulsar £9995 standmounts made Parttimeaudiophile’s “Top Ten” list at Washington DC’s Capital Audio Fest show, the other 9 loudspeakers chosen ranged from $45,000 to $294,000. In fact over the decades Jeff has long since give up counting the number of times they have been honoured with Best Sound of Show.

Our demo Perspective and Pulsar have only been with us for a couple of months but they have already clocked up a number of early sales and made a huge and surprising impression on everyone who has listened in passing. You will be hearing a lot more about them and we will soon be adding some more dealers up and down the country. They will be featuring at the Audio Deluxe Hifi show in March 2026 as well.

For this system I very much liked the Tara Labs cables. The Josephs and the Soulnotes possess much inherent speed, definition and outlining to the music and the Hemingway wires – amongst other delights – serve to cultivate these things even further. Some customers will love this leaner, faster and more delineated sound, but my preference was for using Tara Labs which give a slightly bigger, more grand sound with a touch more fullness and a more relaxed unhurried cohesion of time. They fill out the Perspectives just a little more than Hemingway Z-core and bring calmness and a certain elegance to the natural life and vividity that this system has.

I picked ONE series XLR and speaker cables, one down from the very popular Muse range. It is a good sweet spot for this level of system; you could certainly go higher of course and you could go one lower to the AIR’s as well and still have an incredible system, but ONE is a good fit relative to the expense and high performance of these boxes and speakers.

For mains cables I picked the new Shunyata Alpha X NR. These move things on considerably from the previous generation of Alpha and have that delicate drop of warmth and sweetness that we have come to expect from a Shunyata power cord, and with superb tonality and soundstaging too. (Note that these are not present in the photographs.)

Nearly all of our builds are spec’d with a mains conditioner if budget allows. They do so much for a good setup and although not pictured, I have included the entry level Venom V6 in the cost of this system. In a few months time we will have their new Hydra Delta X conditioner and that is probably more in keeping with this system budget but it wouldn’t be fair to include it if it is not quite available yet.

The rack is a Bassocontinuo Revolution X. Not cheap but then racks are very important and another component that gets overlooked far too often. Basso hifi racks contain very real and cogent technology and are rigorously tested and developed. This means that equipment on a Rev X automatically sounds neutral, open, extended at both ends, nimble and dynamic. It is a crucial part of the performance of this system.

I will be writing a whole article on racks very soon and it really is long overdue. We have been investing a lot in them recently and exploring them a lot too. For example, we have yet to find a rack that beats their Aeroline model for a Tidal system which is the range down from this. There is most definitely a synergy of different rack types and materials for different brands of equipment. It’s our job to advise you which rack will get the very best from the equipment you have invested in.

Open, vivacious, holographic, dynamic, sweet and soulful. All the usual Lotus tenets then which one would expect.

What you perhaps notice more is just how dense, physical and bold this sound is. Some of that is the direct drive Taurus which we know still has some belt drive-esque leanings. I am using the shorter 10.5 tonearm here (which I prefer) so its not short on precision or speed but yet it still sounds grandiose, warm and meaty. The Mysonic has superb natural detail. Although it is bottom of the range and the mighty Platinum is the cart I personally employ the most, I don’t feel short changed by the Eminent and it certainly doesn’t ever exhibit any lack of refinement,

The E2 is also quite physical. Maybe the V2 is even fuller and richer than the older model ? It certainly seems that way from memory. Its bouyancy and zest are also still there in spades. Music confidently leaps into the room, your albums sound like an actual human event rather than an electronic reproduction. Dynamic contrast is breathtaking, as is low level inner detail.

The Soulnote A3 does its usual thing of almost perfect neutrality, with just a trace of sweetness in the upper registers and superb agility and timing.

And the Joseph Perspectives feel like the perfect speaker to sit at the end of the chain. Their core strengths of speed, holographics, openness, realism and saturation of tone are mirrored exactly by the same strengths inherent in the Soulnotes. This marrying of ideals then makes for an exquisite system synergy. The components are working in harmony and if Soulnote ever manufactured a loudspeaker, surely it would sound and perform very much like a Perspective 2 Graphene.

This is a wonderful system. It has a magical balance. It is seriously high performing but in that effortless, unostentatious manner. The sheer openness, the “reach out and touch” factor is incredibly appealing. People used to the more mainstream UK systems which may cost even more that this one, would listen to this and be baffled by the way the music is so effortlessly unravelled and organised, the incredible dynamics on offer, the rich and very real tone and most of all, how the system is everywhere in the room apart from where the speakers are located, physical and 3d, human succulent shapes solidifying all around the soundfield. And the bass, my word the bass from those tiny Josephs when the music calls for it, deep, propulsive, energetic and completely floating in space.

FULL SYSTEM PRICE

Brinkmann Taurus/10.5, £17,490
MySonic Eminent EX, £3,760
Soulnote E2 V2, £6,900
Soulnote A3, £18,900
Joseph Perspective 2 Graphene, £16,995
Tara Labs ONE XLR 1m, £4,800
Tara Labs ONE speaker cables 2.5m, £6,200
Shunyata Alpha X (x2), £5,700
Shunyata Venom V6, £2,850
Shunyata Alpha XC C19, £2,850
HifiStay Hardpoint Trinia, £1,600
Revolution X 3 shelf, £9,990

£98,035