MOLA MOLA Ossetra

The comparison with Class A is not entirely out of place, because the Ossetra has a Class A driver section; you will discover that the manufacturer is not exaggerating after just half an hour, when the monoblock chassis become properly hot. Very hot, in fact. I understand that the designers wanted to preserve the unusual format and wavy chassis silhouette, but the components inside would certainly benefit from heatsinks or some kind of ventilation slots.

Returning to the treble and the presence region of the frequency spectrum, I perceived, for example, my favourite Away Down The River (Alison Krauss) a little differently through the Mola Mola than I do at home. Where, with my TAD, I hear a controlled thickness in the mid-bass that pulls the singer’s vocal forward and lights up the guitar solo in the upper mids, the result with the Ossetra monoblocks is more “studio-like”. Nothing and no one are favoured here, so Alison does not reach out to me quite as much, but in return I have a perfect overview of who is standing or sitting and where, how they move, and how voices and instruments interact with the space in which the music was recorded. Blue Spanish Sky (Chris Isaak) once again confirmed the unbelievable intelligibility of everything happening at the lower end of the spectrum. The control of the bass guitar is admirable, and although it is not meant to be a centrepiece of the track—this is reserved for Isaak’s Elvis-like baritone—it is the very bass guitar that forms the backbone of the track. Everything happens with absolute precision and ease: no electrical haze, no noise added to the recorded material.

This brings me to the second part of the review. Mola Mola naturally developed the Ossetra monoblocks to pair with their Kula preamplifier, which can also be fitted with the Tambaqui DAC module, which I have reviewed earlier. Logic therefore suggests— and also some published reviews support it —that only with the Kula these mono amplifiers truly blossom and fly in their full glory. So, I liberated the Grimm Audio MU2 from its preamp duties and let the Kula do the work instead, with the MU2 serving only as a streamer. To keep it short: of the two, I would still choose the MU2 as a preamp. With it, you get a firmer sound, more precise transients, and better-defined edges and contours. With the Kula, it is as if someone has hung a very light veil between you and the musicians - and that is not what you want. It is possible, and likely, that another pair of XLR interconnects and a power cable and an additional piece of gear in the signal path are the reason for that, compared to less complicated MU2. I tried to experiment with the signal cables, and it is true that moving from copper wires with Furutech CF-602F plugs to the silver-gold wires of Gryphon Vanta interconnects reduced this veil, but not all of it. If you decide on Mola Mola, it makes sense to have the Kula preamplifier and Tambaqui in the chain as well, anyway. That is perfectly fine, but in that case, you certainly will not avoid searching for the best-matching interconnect and power cable. It would be a shame to underestimate this part and fail to get the most of the Ossetra monos.