The first to give us a song is Aaron Neville with »Summertime«. SAM V2 is playing in the usual manner. Wide room image, exact accentuation and position of the singing voice and wonderful, controlled power down to the lower octaves. What more could the new SAM G2 essentially offer? No longer than 30 seconds does it take to come up with a reply: it succeeds in presenting a much more composed reproduction, creating a very pleasant, but for older Audionet amps rather unusual atmosphere that can be outlined in one word: musicality. The soundscape is more colourful.



With the track »Rising Star« by trumpet player Till Brönner from Berlin, the new version gets down to work in a fresher and noticeably more light-footed way. Single notes arise like out of nowhere, provide more acoustical information, which becomes audible especially with the trumpet. Instead of going about it vigorously only in the low registers like the old SAM can certainly do, the G2 apparently opens up a new octave level deep down below. Representative of this shall be the remark by a colleague referring to the T+A loudspeaker: »I don’t see a 12” woofer, where does the energy in the low range come from?«



Good question – and the answer is that this is obviously one of the virtues of the new Audionet amplifier. But this is still not enough to run rings around its forerunner or even send it to the backbenches. Which is why Vast may now step up with their song »Touched«. What begins with harmless guitar music and soft vocals, turns just over a minute later into a brutal rock piece. Here many amplifiers simply fall so much from grace that the result sounds dull, dreary and annoying. 



The new SAM G2 handles this music in a serene, nonchalant manner, it has the gift to revamp even this track with some sort of slinky swing. Its predecessor sounds more clinical, intellectually cooler and – one can hardly describe it with another term – anemic, too. Dynamically speaking, the two of them are not all that far apart with this song, but the G2 plays clearer, without limitations. Its style of elocution bears similarities to mostly American integrated amplifiers beyond the 10,000 EUR threshold. For an integrated amplifier from Audionet this quality level is sensational virgin territory. 



And the longer the new SAM G2 is allowed to audition, the more attractive virtues it serves up which until now were never to be expected in this price category. There is an album by David Gilmour called »Live In Gdansk«. Naturally it contains »Shine On You Crazy Diamond« in its original version, i.e. with those tones at the beginning which occur when you sweep gently with your fingertips over the edges of differently filled wine glasses. The old Audionet performs this melodic epos »ostensibly«, the new one »profoundly«. Once it’s the pin sharp image of a landscape (SAM V2), and then it’s the landscape itself (SAM G2).