Conrad Johnson MV60SE Power Amplifier

For nearly thirty years, Conrad Johnson has helped define the concept of high end audio through its relentless pursuit of excellence, its use of only the finest available component parts, and its single-minded dedication to building the best high-fidelity products available. Less frequently acknowledged, however, is Conrad Johnson’s dedication to the “forgotten” audiophile - the dedicated music-lover who requires musically satisfying performance but whose budget does not aspire to the loftiest of current offerings. For as long as the company has been producing its world-renowned Premier series of audio instruments, it has also been adapting the technologies and construction techniques responsible for those products and applying them to a more affordable, but equally discriminating, line of components.
The MV60SE is the latest link in that chain and it personifies the same compulsive attention to even the smallest detail that differentiate the true audio originals from less serious designs. The MV60SE is a 60 watt per channel stereo vacuum-tube power amplifier that achieves its true-to-life sound through a combination of canny engineering and daring innovation.
Consistent with Conrad Johnson’s design philosophy that circuits should be kept as simple as possible, the MV60SE works its magic with just eight vacuum tubes.
A composite triode input stage is direct coupled to a cathode-coupled phase inverter. Limited negative feedback is applied to the circuit to reduce distortion and provide a sufficiently high damping factor to control most real-world speaker systems. Discrete DC power supply regulators are provided for the input and inverter stages, in order to isolate each stage from the output signal.
Variations on this simple circuit have provided the blueprint for many superb sounding CJ products in the past.
This latest iteration benefits from recent advances achieved in our Premier range of products. Conrad-Johnson’s continuing research into transformer design has uncovered an intricate variation on transformer construction that results in unusually wide bandwidth output transformers. These ultra-wide-band Trans-spectral transformers are used in all of the current Premier power amplifiers. The MV60SE is the first time these costly transformers have been used outside the Premier range. The MV60SE also benefits from recent advances in power supply design developed for Conrad Johnson’s flagship products.
Conrad Johnson products are internationally known for setting the standard of parts quality for the industry, and the MV60SE proudly upholds that tradition.
Premium quality parts are used throughout. All circuit capacitors, including the main power supply filter and storage capacitors, are polypropylene – there are no electrolytic capacitors in the audio circuit or in the related power supplies. All audio circuit resistors are special high-precision, low-noise metal film types. The obsession for parts quality extends to the precision machined, gold plated input jacks and output connectors ‹ even the internal wiring was chosen on the basis of its sound quality in its specific application. The MV60SE was subjected to exhaustive batteries of instrumental and listening tests before its design was finalized.
The result of all this painstaking attention to detail is an amplifier that is both refined and surprisingly powerful.
Although it is conservatively rated at 60 watts per channel, it offers sufficient power to drive all but the most difficult speaker systems reliably for thousands of hours of listening pleasure without requiring complex user-adjustments. Users who have not previously experienced the dynamic range and lifelike timbre of tubed components will find the MV60SE an ideal introduction to the joys of modern tubed products. Along with its tonal integrity, its ease of use, low maintenance costs, and reliability will be a revelation for those who have only experienced “entry-level” tubed gear. For veteran audiophiles, its modest price and size make it the perfect “second system” amplifier, bringing Conrad Johnson quality and reliability to a different room from the state of the art primary system. A word of warning if you are in this last group: whether in the den, library, or bedroom, the MV60SE’s wide bandwidth and low distortion will give your main system a run for the money.

Power (ultralinear operation): 60 watts per channel RMS both channels driven into 4 Ω from 30 Hz to 15 kHz at no more than 1% total harmonic distortion or intermodulation distortion (can be re-connected internally for 8 or 16 Ω loads)
Sensitivity: 820 mV to full power Frequency response: 20 Hz to 20 kHz + 0, - 0.5 dB
Hum and noise: 95 dB below full power output
Input impedance: 100 kOhms
Dimensions: 448 (W) x 337 (D) x 178 (H) mm
Weight: 21.8 kg

Turnaround

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