Audiophilepure

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“So far, I’d streamed everything. To hear if the H95’s sound remained constant regardless of storage format, I played a track I’d ripped from CD to my solid-state drive of music files: “Where Are You Tonight?,” from the Cowboy Junkies’ The Caution Horses (16/44.1 FLAC, RCA). It did — the clarity, high resolution, and prominent-but-not-too-bright highs I’d heard before I now heard again. Margo Timmins’s voice was so immediate I could’ve sworn she was in the room, singing to me. Immediately after, I put on “New Rules,” from Dua Lipa’s Live Acoustic EP (16/44.1 FLAC, Warner Bros.). The highs were similarly prominent; Lipa’s voice had tremendous presence, which viscerally punched to the fore just as Knopfler’s had; and each note of the piano accompaniment had startling clarity.”

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“Constellation Audio’s Inspiration Integrated 1.0 is everything you’d want in a fashion-forward, nearly state-of-the-art integrated amplifier. Its inspired industrial design will be appealing to many, as will its remote control, one of the very best I’ve used. But it’s the Integrated 1.0’s sound that places it in the upper echelon of integrated amplifiers I’ve spent time with. It serves up equal and healthy helpings of clarity, smoothness, linearity, and dynamics without sacrificing anything along the way. For that reason, it proved one of the more difficult products to review of my experience: it gave me effectively nothing to glom on to — to my thinking, an emphatically good thing.”

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“Well recorded piano music had a crystalline quality. Some of the felts’ softness was hardened somewhat, but returned when playing in Triode. Interestingly, the crystalline quality remained in Triode in addition to the tactile sensitivities. For example, my old mate John Bingham (a long time, beloved piano Prof at London’s Trinity College of Music) sounded as beautiful as ever via the Icon on his ‘70’s benchmark Schubert Songs, arr. Liszt on a Meridian LP (audiophiles, you should search for this record). His delicate touch sounded as effective as ever in Ultralinear. You’ll be one happy, tube-loving audiophile. But, in Triode, the sweetness on the trailing edge of notes was beguiling. ”

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“If you’re of the persuasion that no amount of power is ever enough, or perhaps simply want to future-proof yourself against the unlikely purchase of impossibly insensitive speakers, then Musical Fidelity’s M8xi is your man. But this integrated amp, bluff exterior and all, is not only capable of driving a short piece of damp string, but does so with a dexterity and fleetness of foot that utterly belies its bulk. Chalk one up to Austria.”

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“Piano stage left, ringing out with all the naturalness you could hope to hear. Audience arrayed around and to the sides, percussion on the right. Ray himself just left of centre, precisely where the pianist/vocalist would be sitting. Silky, smooth, open – ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’ was punctuated by authentic-sounding saxophone and brass while the ‘door knocking’ on the snare drum had punch and crispness to dazzle.

Above all, it was sounding so spacious that it delivered what I couldn’t quite derive from the live McCartney feed. The Vena II Play was an open window into this audiophile-grade recording. £799? I am humbled.”

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“Finally, regarding the power supply, the smaller amps have one third more storage capacitance. All .8 models still use very large Plitron toroidal transformers, and have new On/Off switching and high current delay, allowing conformance with the stand-by draw of 1 Watt. The front-end circuits have larger power supply decoupling, “This coupled with interleaved layout techniques has reduced the output noise of the amplifiers by another 10 dB. The range between peak output and average noise floor is greater than 130 dB.”

Even in the vault-like room, the noise level of the XA200.8 through even higher efficiency speakers is to my ear nonexistent. Note that 130dB is in the range of Class D amps! The only time I heard a peep from these monoblock amps was sometimes, when warming up or cooling, a tine of the heatsink fins might ping once or twice, but not continuously. The quietness set the stage for music played at a moderately high listening level to explode from the coveted “black background”— an exciting experience!”

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“Next I went all old-school audiophile — I had a feeling the Plinius would have a field day. I loaded up “Only Time,” from The Very Best of Enya (16/44.1 FLAC, Reprise/Qobuz), and raised the volume on the Hegel until the SPL meter on my phone measured 85dB at the listening position. The sound was fully enveloping, the Plinius melding with the Vimbergs to produce dense images on a vast soundstage. The bass was strong but more round than square, and the feathery highs were miles from harsh. “Caribbean Blue” was next, from Enya’s Shepherd Moons (16/44.1 FLAC, Reprise/Qobuz), and the sound was just right. Her lead and overdubbed backing vocals were clear and just a touch upfront, but the characteristic that set the A-150 apart from most other solid-state amps I’ve heard was the density of tonal color. This amp gave me the gestalt of what music should be — full, rich, dense — without primarily focusing on detail retrieval and transparency.”

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“An area where the No.333 excelled was dynamics. I never got the sense that I was running out of headroom, even on high-level, percussion-heavy recordings. Yet, perhaps more important for a high-power amplifier, the Levinson remained transparent at very low levels. Often, the designer’s need to use multiple pairs of transistors to obtain the combination of high output voltage and output current results in a murkiness at low levels. This wasn’t the case with this amplifier: in the performance of the Brahms Horn Trio on Stereophile’s Serenade CD, there is a magical moment when horn soloist Julie Landsman (first chair of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra) and violinist Sheryl Staples (associate concertmaster at Cleveland) are playing the slow movement’s theme triple-pianissimo. When I made the recording at the 1995 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, I tried to capture the full dynamic range of the live sound, which meant that this elegiac passage peaks at no more than –50dBFS. Yet with the Levinson driving the B&W Silver Signaturess, you could easily hear the slight unevenness in the violin tone that results from the player not using vibrato and drawing the bow very slowly across the string. This is one transparent amplifier.”