Solid State Power Amp Reviews

While walking home from the office the other day I passed a gleaming, perfectly detailed Harley-Davidson, lightly customized, as many are these days. I didn't stop and drool, but I couldn't unsnap my eyes from it. As I drew parallel to that hawg, a Ricky Martin look-alike threw his leg over the saddle and thumbed the starter. No, you don't have to be a tattooed, beer-gutted redneck anymore to rear up and slam down on a kick-starter of one of those beasts. These days, it's all done with the push of a button. Dude.

The word on Bel Canto's upsampling DAC was already out when I visited their room at the 2000 Consumer Electronics Show looking to get one of the first samples. But despite my protestations, all Bel Canto's Mike McCormick wanted to talk about was their company's new digital amp, the eVo 200.2. Sure, there's a future out there in which all sources will be digital and D/A conversion will occur in the speaker (or later?). But today, I see no practical advantage in a digital amplifier with only an analog input. It may be more efficient and it may be new technology, but the amplifier has got to stand on the same footing as any analog design and justify its existence by the way it sounds. The eVo did make a good case for itself at the demo, so I signed up to get one for review.

Keith Herron plopped himself down in my listening chair and smiled, clearly pleased with the sound of my system now that his M150 monoblock power amplifiers had been substituted for my Musical">http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/205/">Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 300. He began to tell me why.

"Be careful what you wish for, or you just might get it."

Back in 1992, Robert Harley's Stereophile review of the McCormack">http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/520/">McCormack DNA-1 and Parasound HCA-2200 amplifiers (April 1992, Vol.15 No.4) and the accompanying technical measurements piqued my interest. So, with great curiosity, I arranged to borrow a DNA-1 to audition, along with competitive amps from Aragon, Bryston, and PS Audio. They were all a leap ahead of my Adcom GFA-555, but it took an act of great courage to accept that, despite its less-than-stellar measured performance, the DNA-1 was my favorite. The bottom line was that the DNA-1 excelled at driving my Apogee Duettas to make lively and harmonically pure sounds. I bought my McCormack DNA-1 amplifier before I began reviewing equipment for Stereophile, and it still occupies an honored place in my system.

With its latest series of FPB (Full Power Balanced) amplifiers, Krell is taking careful aim at the seam between classic high-power two-channel systems and quality multi-channel installations where sound is yet paramount. Nevertheless, Krell founder Dan D'Agostino was adamant: Krell's Class A components were designed for music playback. "I'm a purist, like you, Jonathan!" he told me.

Nothing like scarcity to create demand, right? Well, there's been a scarcity of Nuvistors out there for decades, and hardly any demand. Do you know about the Nuvistor, aka the 6CW4? It was a tiny triode tube smaller than your average phono cartridge. Enclosing its vacuum in metal rather than glass, the Nuvistor was designed as a long-lived, highly linear device with low heat, low microphony, and low noise---all of which it needed to have any hope of competing in the brave new solid-state world emerging when RCA introduced it in the 1960s.