_Amplifier Reviews

One of Belgian artist René Magritte’s most famous paintings shows a pipe with words underneath that read: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. This is not a pipe. Of course, we all know it’s a pipe. So what’s the artist trying to say?

The classic Rob Roy cocktail is made from whisky and sweet vermouth; stiff and sweet. Lovers of 19th cocktails also know that a Rob Roy can be made “dry” or “perfect”, the former using dry vermouth, while the “perfect” contains both dry and sweet.

Two of the principals of Riviera Audio Labs, Luca Chiomenti (audio designer and engineer) and Silvio Delfino (sales and marketing) spent a few decades talking about the kind of amplifier they’d like to make, if they ever decided to make one. Five years ago, on […]

Audio Note has rightly earned its place among luxury brands. But with an entry price of €3,950, the long-awaited integrated valve amplifier Cobra has also sparked curiosity among music aficionados who normally wouldn’t be able to buy equipment from the British premium brand. In the […]

Some review components announce themselves upon arrival and the Clones Audio 25iRX Integrated Amplifier did so with resounding clarity.

Sometimes power is a good thing.

There are times when the review writing process gets short-circuited by enjoyment. Where I very nearly just want to say — this thing is great, get one.

What does the 22 Watt per channel, point-to-point wired, pure Class A Line Magnetic Audio LM-845iA Integrated Amplifier sound like? Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t sound like much of anything except pure power.

Do you know France-based Kora? Based in Toulouse, the ‘Silicon Valley’ of France, the company’s principals work in the Aerospace industry specializing in power supplies and signal treatment while also building integrated amplifiers that utilize tubes and transistors in an unconventional manner.

The $2,000 H95 is Oslo-based Hegel Music Systems’ least expensive H series integrated amplifier. You could call it their entry level model, but that would be misleading.

I owned an original NAD 3020 back in 1980 and I loved, loved, loved it. Everything about it including its $135 price tag. The new NAD D 3020 V2 clocks in at $399 which, when adjusted for inflation, costs the same as the original (give […]

My great-grandmother on my father’s mother’s side loved Chiclets, especially the red ones. She didn’t speak much English, dressed only in black after her husband passed, and perpetually rolled rosaries between her thumb and fingers, the speed of the passing beads based on what was […]

Listen here: I like tubes, I like integrated amplifiers, I like integrated amplifiers with DACs, I like Bluetooth, and I like well-made stuff. Seeing as the Quad VA-One is all of the above (and more), I like the Quad VA-One.

Last year, I reviewed and compared six streaming integrated amplifiers as Editor of AudioStream. I find value in these types of comparisons both as a doer and as a reader because comparative listening to like-components allows us to readily hear the sonic flavors baked into […]