Chandler RS124 or LA2A clone?

Of course! No worries at all. I knew that. BTW, the RS124 is killin'! Completed my first track with it. Offered a few options with my 64 P bass but ultimately it came down to my hollow body Jack Casady bass, using flatwound strings with foam under the bridge running thru my Fatboy Tube DI and into the Chandler RS124. Whew! Nice and thumpy, for sure. For the icing on the cake, I was wearing my McCartney tour t-shirt. 

A vote for the Stam Audio SA2A. Love mine, lives on bass, sounds great, really affordable and way better components than the Warm

Warm uses a Chinese T4 cell right?

Cheaper tubes, Cheaper transformers, cheaper all around, made in china and more expensive. Stam in my opinion beat Warm to the punch there, Warm should release a blue stripe comp.

Let's not measure talliwackers here. Don't believe either are using top, TOP of the line components. They are both built to a price point.

Yeah - if they sound good, they sound good. I haven't tried either.

I stand corrected. Can't argue that.

To clear up confusion that's been circling...

- The WA-2A uses the widely respected Kenetek T4B opto-cell - (made in the USA)

- According to David Geren (the owner of CineMag) he doesn't manufacture LA-2A style transformers that out-perform the CineMag's used in the WA-2A.  They make larger ones that serve as nice eye candy, but the ones we're using are over-specced for the design.  Feel free to contact David Geren (the owner of CineMag) and ask him personally, he's an all around great guy.  David spent 2 and half days with our WA-2A before deciding on the transformer designs to use, and he believes our unit out-performs the 2 other very costly LA-2A style compressors he compared the WA-2A to, one of them costing $3500...  

- The tubes in the WA-2A signal path are high-end Tung-Sol brand.  Many expensive tube gear pieces (above $3k) ship with cheaper tubes than what's in the WA-2A.  Could the use of NOS tubes make the WA-2A unit even better out of the box? It's possible, it's also preference.  The brand of the NOS tubes plays a factor too.  NOS = "New Old Stock"... so a 20-30 year old tube could be of poorer quality than a modern tube.  We always encourage users to try different tubes to experiment since they're so easily interchangeable.

- The capacitor in the WA-2A that drives the output transformer is a hand made oil and paper style.  These are rarely used in mass produced products anymore due to their large size (take up too much space) and difficulty to manufacture.  Sometimes emphasis is put on what capacitor is used here, we found this one to be very musical and forgiving, we liked it better than some smaller name brand choices we tried.  It's the large yellow rectangle shaped capacitor seen in the circuit picture on our website.

Feel free to contact info@warmaudio.com with any questions!

Good to hear from you Bryce. I realize that any manufacturer might be reticent about getting into a shouting match online, so I'm glad you're able to clear up some of these questions. I've had nothing but positive experiences with my Warm Audio gear. Of course, that's just my experience, but it's helped me get closer than I expected to the kind of sound I wish I could get, but can't at home.

good luck hightenor, Where are you in the UK? I have family there.

Of course when we all look to get a holy grail kind of sound, it's never easy at lower prices, but in shootout after shootout between things like compressors and microphones, I've more often than not heard tone differences, but not necessarily "better" tone. People rave on about U-47's, but the U-47's had many design changes along the way, any two rarely sound the same, and many people prefer some newer versions.

A while back, in the 1176 style shootout, almost every manufacturer was represented. There were something like a dozen files of 1176's. I preferred the two original Urei's and then the Warm WA76. So, the Warm took the bronze to my ears. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many of us found we preferred the WA2A or the Stam to even UAD's current crop.

Having met Bryce at AES and after doing a couple of videos using Warm's products, I know for a fact that Bryce will be as transparent as possible, (no manufacturer can give away every secret), and is dedicated to taking enough time to test all the different brands of parts available. Only then does he choose the part he feels performs the best.

Eventually someone will have both, and we'll see and hear how they differ.

Bryce has been great with fantastic customer support. I have one of the very early WA76 compressors that had a meter that was way off and could not be calibrated. Bryce had me send it to him and I had it back in a couple of days. It has been perfect since.