Amplifiers

Whest Audio’s PS.30RDT was released in 2009 as a near descendant of the company’s flagship MC REF V, and it cost a whopping £2,799 when new. It comes in a single 430x280x72mm box with a Whest MC REF V Hybrid filter and an ultra low noise bipolar opamp DIP8 chip severely biased towards Class A. […]

In 2016, this £1,250 integrated amplifier was released. It features five line inputs, a moving magnet phono stage, and aptX wireless Bluetooth, however it lacks DAC functionality. Aside from the Bluetooth, which is unabashedly a convenience feature, this amplifier looks a lot like something from the 1980s. It’s a big, Class AB thug with a

When it was first released in 2010, this dual mono integrated Class AB powerhouse (claiming 125W into 8 Ohms) was a costly piece of kit at £5,750. It’s solidly constructed and polished, but it’s not a £6,000 Japanese device — there’s no luxuriously covered brushed aluminium, astonishing shutlines, or a plethora of elegantly performing buttons.

The golden period of Japanese hi-fi was probably from 1976 to 1981, when the Yen was severely undervalued on international markets, allowing Japanese manufacturers to produce items that Western businesses simply couldn’t match. Despite the fact that Japanese hi-fi became linked with value, all of the main brands had high-end sections. The items that came

Page after page of criticism and opinion – sometimes dressed up as fact, sometimes not – on how bad Japanese amplifiers were in 1980 could be found in any British hi-fi journal. They claimed this was especially true in the inexpensive sector, where all of their “frills” meant money wasn’t spent on items that would

Sony amplifiers had abandoned their unique but unstable V-FET output transistors by 1979, and were inventing in new ways – the goal was to bring an interesting twist to a standard design. As a result, Sony engineers placed the power transistors on the main circuit board from the center of the new TA-F range upwards

Back in 1995, the globe was a completely different place. We were assaulted by a slew of black pressed steel-cased transistor amplifiers and CD players in hi-fi; Audiolab’s 8000a reigned supreme on the showroom floor, and HDCD was the buzz of the day. Valve amplifiers were slowly re-entering the public consciousness, but they were still

Cyrus Audio’s ONE integrated amplifier, which debuted at the 2016 Munich High End Show, is a Class D design that employs the company’s hybrid Class D technology’s third iteration. When headphones are plugged in, the power supply rails switch to powering the Class AB headphone stage, claiming 100W RMS per channel into 6 ohms. As

Hitachi’s discovery and production of MOSFETs (Metal Oxide Silicon Field Effect Transistor) had a major role in the hi-fi world that was just around the corner in the mid-1970s. The world had only been in solid-state for fifteen years and was still on a long and steep learning curve. However, Hitachi’s new power MOSFET output

Tube amplification was viewed as an extreme niche in hi-fi in the late 1990s, similar to how most petrolheads thought of kit cars (i.e. “interesting, but not for me”). So maybe it’s a sign of the times that we’re suddenly getting more new valve items than transistor products. Icon Audio happened to be in the