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Reviews of Attainable Hi-Fi & Home-Theater Equipment

Most Popular Equipment

Details: Written by: Roger Kanno; Created: 15 April 2015

Note: Measurements can be found through this link.

Reviewers' Choice Although Parasound’s Halo amplifiers have remained essentially unchanged for over a decade, they are still considered to offer outstanding value, even by today’s standards: reference-quality sound for budget prices. Boasting classic circuit designs by renowned engineer John Curl and prices that range from just under $1000 to a few thousand dollars, Parasound’s Halo models have gained a fervent following among value-minded audiophiles.

Details: Written by: Thom Moon; Created: 01 April 2015

Reviewers' Choice It’s no secret that LPs are making a comeback. No, they’ll probably never replace downloads, or even CDs, in sheer numbers, but the format, left for dead in the 1980s, has regained status. In 2013, vinyl accounted for nearly 3% of all recorded music sales. Many popular rock groups now release their recordings on vinyl, in some cases exclusively. And that can present a problem for audio and music aficionados whose electronics lack a phono stage or preamp that can boost the very low output of a phono cartridge to a level an integrated amp can use. After CDs became the primary medium for music, there was little reason for manufacturers to expend the extra money necessary to include a phono stage in their integrated amplifiers, preamplifiers, and receivers. Most such models built from the mid-’80s to the present have only line-level inputs.

Details: Written by: Vince Hanada; Created: 15 March 2015

Note: Measurements taken in the anechoic chamber at Canada's National Research Council can be found through this link.

Reviewers' Choice SVS was founded in 1998 by four audiophile-engineers and based on a retail model that, at the time, was bold and rare: they would sell subwoofers directly to the consumer via the Internet, bypassing brick-and-mortar stores. This allowed SVS to offer greater value than was normally found for the same price at audio dealers. Their first subwoofer was a unique, cylindrical passive design with an external amplifier. As SVS’s popularity grew, its product line expanded to include conventional box subwoofers. Today, SVS is known for building great subs that hold their own against much-higher-priced competition.

Read more: SVS Prime Tower Loudspeakers

Details: Written by: Erich Wetzel; Created: 01 March 2015

In this era of flyweight amplifiers, Musical Fidelity’s M6si ($2999 USD) is a middleweight. We often assume that quality is directly proportional to mass, but in this case that might actually be true.

The M6si weighs 36.5 pounds and measures 17.2”W x 4.9”H x 15.6”D. The build quality is high -- nothing feels insubstantial. Even the top and rear panels feel as if made of heavier-gauge metals than the norm. The sample I received was black with silver accents; it’s also available in all silver. The M6si comes double-boxed and wrapped in a nice fabric bag, with white gloves for handling and setup, to prevent the transfer of skin oils to the nicely finished exterior.

Details: Written by: Jeff Stockton; Created: 15 February 2015

Note: Measurements taken in the anechoic chamber at Canada's National Research Council can be found through this link.

Reviewers' Choice The first time I attended a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, before the music began, I kept looking around the Armour Stage of the Chicago Symphony Center for the speaker system -- I figured it had to be somewhere, off to the sides or above our heads. Eventually, it dawned on me that no amplification was involved. What I was about to hear was the aural ideal aspired to by generations of audiophiles: dynamic range, instrumental separation, clarity, and a hall ambience free from electronic enhancement.

Details: Written by: Hans Wetzel; Created: 01 February 2015

Note: Measurements taken in the anechoic chamber at Canada's National Research Council can be found through this link.

Reviewers' Choice Paradigm has been around since 1982, and since then the Canadian company has become one of the top hi-fi manufacturers in the world, in terms of both volume of sales and quality of product. Their nearly 250,000-square-foot facility, outside Toronto, is the most impressive audio factory I’ve seen. They design and build just about everything in-house, test prototypes in their own 33,000-cubic-foot anechoic chamber, and ship to over 55 countries. Paradigm’s success is a result of many factors, but perhaps most significant is their process of evolutionary rather than revolutionary design, whose success is borne out in high sales and good sound. Despite this, I was never taken with Paradigm’s offerings. There was nothing distasteful about them; I just found their appearance somewhat pedestrian and lacking in personality.

Details: Written by: Erich Wetzel; Created: 15 January 2015

Cary Audio SL-100 Cary Audio is based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1989, Cary Audio quickly became known as a builder of high-quality, two-channel, tubed audio electronics. Their model 805 monoblock, now named the CAD-805AE, has been around for nearly as long as the company itself, and has received many positive reviews over the decades. Cary now serves a wider audience with both tubed and solid-state amplifiers and preamplifiers, a hybrid headphone amp and hybrid D/A converters, as well as solid-state DACs, music servers, and surround-sound processors.

Details: Written by: Vince Hanada; Created: 01 January 2015

NuPrime IDA-16 NuPrime, based in Los Angeles, split off from another California audio company, NuForce (Fremont). NuForce had begun in 2005 with high-end power and integrated amplifiers, such as the award-winning Reference 18 mono amp and the P-20 preamplifier, that had innovative switching power supplies that sounded exceptional -- something then virtually unheard of. Then the high-end side seemed to take a back seat, as NuForce went on to introduce $100 DACs and $500 integrated amplifiers.

In 2014, NuForce’s cofounder, Jason Lim, with backing from the OEM factory, bought the assets of NuForce’s high-end division and formed NuPrime. The new company’s first product is the IDA-16, which I first heard about from SoundStage! writer Roger Kanno. A 200Wpc integrated amp with a DSD-capable DAC? This was something I had to review.

Details: Written by: Vince Hanada; Created: 15 December 2014

Anthem MRX 510 Reviewers' Choice For a high-end audio company, one of the most difficult types of component to design is the home-theater receiver. First of all, they need to cram five to nine channels of amps into a single housing. Those amp modules need to be of high quality, as is expected of a high-end brand. On the audio side, there are analog signals, A/D and D/A conversion, and DSP programming to contend with. On the video side, proper HDMI implementation is tricky, along with analog video, A/D conversion, and video upscaling. Another big concern is providing troubleshooting support and firmware updates -- it’s impossible to test an A/V receiver with the myriad combinations of gear it could be hooked up to. Finally, the manufacturer needs to sell it at a price that competes with the plethora of A/V receivers from mass-market audio companies. No wonder only a few audio-enthusiast companies still go to the trouble to design and build them. One of those companies is Anthem.

Details: Written by: Hans Wetzel; Created: 01 December 2014

Monitor Audio A100 Reviewers' Choice It’s easy to look at a small integrated amplifier and scoff. Consider something like NAD Electronics’ 40Wpc C 316BEE, or Arcam’s 50Wpc A19 -- compact, not terribly impressive-looking components thoroughly lacking in style, and sounding excellent. But go smaller still and it’s difficult to picture a tiny, inexpensive, class-D integrated amp powering a pair of real loudspeakers. That’s the province of big class-AB designs adorned with heatsinks and having substantial power supplies.

A few years ago, NuForce’s DDA-100 changed all that. The 2.64-pound -- 2.64! -- integrated amplifier-DAC retails for $549 USD, and offers 50Wpc of minimalist class-D brawn and several digital inputs. Most important, it sounded fantastic -- far better than I’d been aware could be had for under $1000. NAD then reimagined its legendary 3020 integrated amplifier as the D 3020, a class-D integrated amplifier-DAC that develops 30Wpc, and also includes analog inputs, aptX Bluetooth wireless connectivity, a subwoofer output, and a headphone amp -- all for $499.99.

Monitor Audio, a British company with decades of experience designing and making loudspeakers, has entered the mini-integrated-DAC fray with its Airstream A100 ($499.99). It might be easy to prejudge Monitor’s freshman effort in amplifier design as little more than a me-too product, as I did when I was ushered into the company’s suite at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas. Like the NuForce and NAD before it, the Monitor is a small, lifestyle-size model. Unlike them, it trots to a different, perhaps more sophisticated beat.