Integrated Amp Reviews

As a young music lover, I never knew there were such things as separate preamplifiers, amplifiers, and FM tuners. All I knew was that if I wanted to play music from my CD player, hook up my VCR to my stereo, or listen to the radio, I needed that magical device: a receiver. It was all I ever wanted.

After using Bel">http://www.stereophile.com/digitalprocessors/1107bc">Bel Canto's e.One DAC3 with the McIntosh">http://www.stereophile.com/mediaservers/108mac">McIntosh Laboratory MS750 music server, I was so impressed that I wanted to hear Bel Canto's CD transports as well. But willing as Bel Canto president and CEO John Stronczer was to supply me with a CD-2, he suggested I audition the S300iu ($2195, footnote 1).

Old-school audiophiles like me cling to our vinyl records and CDs. We spin them on turntables and slide them into transports, which send electric signals through wires to solid state or tubed amplifiers—a string of hardware devices. But, despite our object-attached ways, we're quite aware that we are living in a software-enabled, Bluetooth-connected, Wi-Fi–facilitated world. Even our Milky Way galaxy is wireless; as that pontificator of everything galactic, scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, has proclaimed, "We're all connected."

What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word "boulder"? I think of a rugged, mountainous landscape with jagged snow-capped peaks. I see images of the last time I drove up from sunny Boulder, Colorado, to Rocky Mountain National Park and discovered so much snow coming down that if we had dared walk too far in, our trail would have been covered with snow and we'd never have been able to find our way out. But how magical it was!

I hate all those automobile reviews that go on and on about a car's design aesthetics. C'mon, I can see what it looks like, even if only in the pictures. Just tell me things I can't appreciate without a run on the Autobahn.

Over the years, I have used and enjoyed in my audio system large, single-purpose components. Each of these chassis has had but one role: preamplifier, amplifier, digital-to-audio converter (DAC), etc. I guess I've been just a little suspicious of products with multiple functions crammed into a single small chassis; I've figured that the designer may have cut a corner that could affect the sound.

Out of the blue, a forever friend I hadn't spoken to in years called and asked me to join him at Riverside Church for a concert of William Basinski performing his renowned Disintegration Loops. Dedicated to the victims of 9/11, the work was completed as Basinski watched the airplanes crash into the World Trade Center from his Brooklyn rooftop.