CES 2015

I visited the Kevro room to get another listen to the Monitor Audio Silver 8 speakers that I reviewed in January. However, I found that Kevro was bringing Cyrus electronics back to the US. The offerings were all in the tidy and familiar half-shoebox format that permits Cyrus devices to stack so neatly.

In the back room, I was introduced to Jeremy Brown, who showed me the new Stereo 200 class-D power amplifier ($3499). This 200Wpc amp has a linear power supply (revealed by the hefty toroidal power transformer in our upside-down view of the internals) and a unique class-D output stage. Most such amps are load-sensitive and that probably accounts for the varying performance with different speakers. The Stereo 200 sends a test signal to the speaker during initial power up to measure the HF impedance of the load so that it can adjust its output to assure HF output-response accuracy.