Products of the Year

Amplification Component of 1994:

Audio Research VT150 monoblock power amplifier ($11,990/pair; reviewed by Robert Harley, Vol.17 No.8, August 1994)

Another very strong group of nominees, the contenders for the amplification crown ranged from the delightful little HeadRoom Supreme headphone amplifier, which has brought me hours of musical pleasure on the move, to the latest assaults on the state of the amplifier art from those long-time bastions of high-end electronics, Krell, Mark Levinson, Conrad-Johnson, and Audio Research.

The Vendetta is the odd man out, no longer being in production since the Berkeley fire destroyed designer John Curl's stock of parts and boards. (John Curl is offering Type C and D (diode) upgrades to present owners for $500 and $250, respectively.) It was available for nomination because it keeps on popping up its head in reviews as Stereophile's reference phono preamplifier.

The winner by a large margin in this category was the Audio Research VT150 monoblock. "You've set the audio industry back 20 years!" Audio Research's Bill Johnson was accused of doing this in 1970. But, a quarter-century later, the sum of everything he knows about power-amplifier design is embodied in the VT150. With audiophiles commonly equating the word "tube" with adjectives like "antique" and "obsolete," it could easily be forgotten that Bill has been producing sophisticated, cutting-edge circuits that, if they used solid-state devices instead of tubes, would be hailed as innovative. Yet he chooses to use tubes. "We simply find that an analog signal going through a vacuum tube doesn't seem to be harmed, whereas putting it through any kind of a semiconductor seems to hurt it," he told Robert Harley last August. "Frankly, whether we like it or not, the tube is simply a better device for audio."

The utilitarian-looking VT150 features balanced inputs and circuitry and is the first Audio Research power amplifier in ten years to use vacuum-tube regulation. Robert Harley's initial reaction when he auditioned the VT150s was that they sounded a little closed-in and subdued in the treble. Then he realized that what he wasn't hearing was the treble grain, etch, hardness, brittle textures, and that steely sound in the upper midrange and treble that we hear in reproduced music but not in live music. "The VT150s presented an astonishingly believable and natural rendering of timbre," he reported in his review. "Instead of hearing a hi-fi representation of the music, I felt I was hearing the music itself."

Finalists (in alphabetical order):
Audio Research LS5 preamplifier ($4995; reviewed by Robert Harley, Vol.17 Nos.8 & 12, August & December 1994)
Conrad-Johnson Premier Eleven stereo power amplifier ($3295; reviewed by Sam Tellig & Wes Phillips, Vol.17 Nos.2 & 10, February & October 1994 Review)
HeadRoom Supreme headphone amplifier ($399; reviewed by John Atkinson & Thomas J. Norton, Vol.17 Nos.1 & 2, January & February 1994 Review)
Krell KSA-300S stereo power amplifier ($9500; reviewed by Thomas J. Norton, Vol.17 No.1, January 1994 Review)
Mark Levinson No.38 preamplifier ($3995; reviewed by Robert Harley, Vol.17 No.8, August 1994 Review)
Vendetta Research SCP-2C phono preamplifier (reviewed by J. Gordon Holt, Vol.11 No.6, June 1988; Robert Harley, Vol.15 No.11, November 1992, & Vol.16 No.9, September 1993; and Thomas J. Norton, Vol.15 No.1, January 1992, & Vol.17 No.3, March 1994 Review)