Integrated Amp Reviews

I can imagine the gaiety and mirth that filled the halls of the electronics industry in the 1950s, as engineer after bespectacled engineer realized that the transistor would soon consign to the outposts of oblivion those ancient technologies that had preceded it. Before long—surely no more than a decade—the hated vacuum tube would vanish from the Earth, along with the tube socket, the tube tester, the tag board, the high-voltage rail, and that lowest rascal of them all, the output transformer. What a jubilant time!

I can't imagine what went wrong.

Once, on a cold, dank, soundless day deep in the Eastern bloc, I watched a man spend over a million dollars on an audio system: a turntable, a fancy horn tweeter, a few wires, and some amplification for his modified Klipschorns. I asked him what he did for a living, and he told me he was a notary public.

When I put together my first hi-fi system in the late 1960s, the amplifier was a Kenwood integrated. Soon I replaced the Kenwood with a Sony integrated, and then, a few years later, I bought a Lecson preamplifier and power amplifier pairing. It's been separates for me ever since.

Besides my 20th wedding anniversary and the 15th anniversary of Listener magazine's first issue, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Roksan Audio Ltd., easily one of the most innovative design and manufacturing firms in British audio. Before Roksan came upon the scene in 1985, none of us had ever seen a loudspeaker whose tweeter was isolated from its surroundings by a sprung suspension. Or a commercial phono preamplifier designed to fit inside a turntable, just a centimeter away from the tonearm base. And who among us could have guessed that the Linn LP12's hegemony—among flat-earthers, I mean—would be broken by a turntable from outside of Scotland? Yet the Roksan Darius loudspeaker, Artaxerxes phono stage, and, above all, Xerxes turntable accomplished those things and more, to the genuine surprise of nearly everyone—and to the benefit of our industry at large, as other firms took those ideas and ran with them.

In Herb Reichert's review of the original Schiit Audio Ragnarok integrated amplifier, he wrote, "Schiit Audio's Ragnarok [is] the first amplifier of my experience that plays earth and sky, mind and body, brown eyes and blue, speakers and headphones, with equal narcotic intensity." Herb's colorful conclusions so persuaded me of the Ragnarok's worth that, when Schiit Audio's Jason Stoddard and Mike Moffatt announced the impending release of the Ragnarok 2, I pitched a Stereophile follow-up review.

My first one-piece stereo—I think I paid $60 for it, including a pair of speakers with pegboard backs—gave me a lot of pleasure when I was young, and I loved it. Everything that came after has been better in every way but one: None has inspired that kind of love. And most have left me wondering if there might be something just a little bit better.

In my review of Krell's FBI integrated amplifier in the July 2007 issue, I noted that $16,500 (it now costs $18,000) seemed an astonishing chunk of change to spend on a product category generally associated with "budget" gear. Now, the 2011 edition of the Stereophile Buyer's Guide lists no fewer than 19 companies selling integrated amps for five figures—one goes for $100,000!—which perhaps suggests that economic slumps prod even the well-heeled to alter their habits. There are, after all, advantages to cramming a preamplifier and a power amplifier into a single box: you need one less pair of interconnects, one less power socket, one less cabinet shelf. And if the integrated contains state-of-the-art parts, elegant circuitry, and a hefty power supply, what's the problem?

And so we have Simaudio Ltd., the veteran Canadian high-end electronics firm, leaping into this realm after 30 years of business with the Moon 700i, priced at $12,000—only two-thirds the price of the Krell, but aimed at the same downsizing but still toney demographic.