Knif Soma 2018 NOS

For your consideration;

A NOS Knif Soma we commissioned from Jonte Knif in 2017 for a mastering studio project that fell through. Provenance posted.

Unit is New Old Stock. Cosmetically immaculate. Not so much as a a fingerprint. Never racked, deployed or otherwise used. Zero studio time on unit. Only audio signals it has passed are from Agilent and Tektronix. Performance is flawless. Warehoused in original shipping materials safely in our climate-controlled storage to present date. Unboxed for testing and photos, then promptly returned to shipping container. Time on units like these is money. Sitting on them in a downturn is untenable.

Everything top-shelf: Elma's supple soft-touch rotary switches; Mundorf capacitors; increasingly scarce Sovtek 6H30P1 valves; Lundahl's most expensive, top-of-range amorphous-core trafos; Jonte's precision hand wound-and-tapped and mu-metal enclosed passive induction coils, bulletproof 10mm machined aluminum chassis.

If you have never heard of Jonte Knif, are unfamiliar with his reputation, or unclear about what precisely this thing is, please do your homework. Read the attached SOS article reviewing Soma, and watch the linked video of him discussing it. Read the sprawling "Mastering EQ Shootout" thread on GS.

Jonte Knif is one of the most highly regarded audio EEs on earth, producing some of the most desirable gear money can buy. Consequently, we understand his waiting lists for anything -from Soma to the Knifonium- have grown very long. Soma is arguably the finest EQ ever built.

Soma is, to our ears, the loveliest, most musical Parametric EQ we have heard. Countless other ME's globally feel the same. We've auditioned it alongside the beloved Sontec MES-432c/6, and Soma wins across the board -especially considering the Sontec is twice the price for poor build-quality and endless maintenance problems, while soma is an indestructible milled-aluminum masterpiece.

Soma adds impossibly euphonic second-harmonic distortion without smearing transients. Vast stereo sound-field manipulation with the m/s encoding. Box-tone is some dark EE sorcery nobody quite understands and Jonte can't seem to explain. Just run it flat and any source material sounds better. As close to a magic box as anything we have ever seen.

My name is Aaron McCarthy. I run the show here at CorkTree. I've ordered numerous pieces from Jonte now, and we have a good working relationship. For that reason, I am happy to help liaison in the exceedingly unlikely event his technical support should ever become required, or for spare Knif-certified valves as needed.