The Ongaku features a multi-section output transformer hand-wound with silver wire, silver-foil coupling capacitors, and silver cabling. Kondo’s masterpiece was the 211-based Ongaku amplifier, which achieved worldwide recognition shortly after Audio Note UK took over international marketing duties. Kondo was the first designer to experiment heavily with silver conductors, which eventually earned him the title of the “Audio Silversmith.” This explains his use of silver conductors and his insistence on making his own capacitors, transformers, cables, and wires with constant attention paid to the resulting tone quality. Yet he understood very clearly that triodes and a single-ended circuit topology were not sufficient, that it was necessary to optimize a design with utmost attention to choice of power tube, output transformer, and passive parts. The engineer in him preferred the inherent simplicity and lower parts-count of SETs relative to other amplifier types-at least as long as high power was not a priority- while the music lover in him felt drawn to the purity and emotional realism of SETs. His enthusiasm for SET amplifiers was based on both reason and emotion. Kondo’s research led him to revisit the long-abandoned single-ended triode (SET) designs that were the first amplifiers built at the dawn of the electronics age. Hiroyasu Kondo resigned his position as an audio circuit designer at CBS to follow his dream of creating an amplifier that delivered “natural sound” free from “mechanical” artifacts.

Variable bias vs fixed bias guitar amp