CES 2015

While his multipurpose integrated amp lurked in the background, I took immediate notice of Dan D'Agostino's hulky 6U form-factor multichannel amplifier, the Cinema Standard. Available with two ($12,000) and three ($15,000) channels, it offers 250Wpc into 8ohms and doubles down to 500 into 4 and 1000 into 2, at 0.1% total harmonic distortion! Now that's dynamic headroom.

Any input can be bused to any/all channels and there are switchable HP and LP filters (18dB/octave, 80Hz) which, while somewhat inflexible, will implement useful bass management when using a stereo system for home theater and a full-clown processor is not upstream.