When EveAnna Manley's team was working on the Stingray's output transformer, the prototype that measured best sounded boring to them. So they wound another that let the bass saturate a little sooner, and when they played it her foot started tapping. She told Elite Audio, "I wanted it to sound like a big amplifier." That story explains a lot about Manley. In a tube amp, the output transformer is what connects the tubes to the speakers, and how it's wound shapes how full and deep the bass sounds. Manley has wound its own in Chino, California, since 1994, so the team can try an idea and have it on the test bench within a couple of hours. Ken Kessler of Hi-Fi News called the Neo-Classic 300B "an education and a revelation." Manley suits listeners who want tube tone with real drive and like to fine-tune a system by ear.

The Stingray integrated is the classic way in. Erick Lichte of Stereophile liked it best with its triode switch on, which gave him a wider, deeper soundstage, and he heard it settle only after a couple hundred hours, so audition one that's broken in. For bigger or harder speakers, look at the Snapper monoblocks. Jeff Dorgay of TONE ran them with about 20 different speakers, Magnepans and vintage Acoustats among them, without trouble, and he called the smaller Mahi monoblocks possibly "the best amps on Earth for driving a pair of Quad 57s." The Neo-Classic 300B is the one for tinkerers. It switches between push-pull and single-ended, offers two speaker taps and lets you dial in feedback by ear, and Kessler spent his review doing just that with DeVore and LS3/5A speakers. Manley amps are biased by hand, and the Stingray and Snapper come with a meter for it.

Manley started in the late 1980s making tube amps and preamps for hifi, then turned to the recording studio. Its microphone preamp and an updated Pultec equalizer made their debut at the 1990 AES show in Los Angeles, and the Variable Mu limiter and Massive Passive EQ followed in the 1990s. EveAnna Manley says the mastering studio is where hifi and pro audio meet, and she judges an amplifier against what she heard there, because "that's where the truth is." The Stingray got its name in a bar in 1997, when Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt said the amp, as drawn on a cocktail napkin, looked like a stingray. Manley still builds its gear in Chino. It winds the transformers there so a part made today matches one made ten years ago, burns in the tubes for days before they go into a unit, and designs around tubes that are still in production so owners can always find replacements.