Integrated Amplifiers

Remember the seventies? Early on in that decade we saw a wave of new Japanese products begin to appear in the shops and on our roads. The result was that by the end of the decade, Honda, Datsun, Sony and Panasonic were household names and everyone who bought them couldn’t praise them enough. This same thing is now happening with China. It’s a work in progress I grant you, but some companies have an excellent track record and Mei Xing is one.

Ming Da has been producing valve amplifiers for over 22 years and is gaining fans worldwide. Furthermore as with this example here, after the amp’s arrival in the UK, Malvern Audio Research upgrades key internal components, swaps in higher quality valves and adds a three year warranty. Taken altogether, this China/UK partnership feels highly compelling and without compromise. This Dynasty Duet 300 Plus is an incarnation of an existing Duet 300B triode amp design, but now employs zero feedback and claims many other audio improvements.

In the not too distant past ‘proper hi-fi’ inevitably had to equate to stacks of similar sized and similar looking separates for it to be taken seriously by audiophiles. But with improvements in more efficient amplifier technologies – such as Class D – combined with the move to higher quality streaming from portable devices, compact hi-fino longer necessarily means compromised quality, as we’ve recently seen with Quad’s Vena (HFC 390) and NAD’s D 7050 (HFC 382) both of which come from companies with long-standing reputations for producing class-leading products. Like these two brands, PS Audio’s usual stomping ground also lies inthe high-end separates arena where its DACs and digital products sit alongside a selection of audio power plants. The Sprout is a different beast, representing the culmination of two and a half year’s work by sales director Scott McGowan, son of CEO and founder Paul McGowan.

The name says it all. In a Googled-up world that monitors your every online movement in order to better sell you things you want to buy, this new miniature Micromega box catches the zeitgeist perfectly. The MyAmp is your amp, because you’re an individual. It’s something that’s made for you – yes, just you, and everyone else like you! Well alright, I’ll excuse it the rather obvious name, because that’s theonly thing predictable about it.

For Essex-based Monitor Audio the only way is not loudspeakers, which it can make and sell pretty much standing on its head. After dabbling in speaker docks and impressing with its W100 AirStream active desktop stereo speakers it is now entering the new world of amplification and streaming. Sporting AirPlay rather than Bluetooth, the A100 is very much aimed at the Apple crowd with their MacBooks, iPhones and iPads crammed with AAC, AIFF and ALAC files in iTunes. That’s not to say non-Apple devices are excluded from the party, PCs and DLNA sources connected to wireless routers canjoin in the fun if they can run iTunes (version 10 or later) and/or can be controlled by Monitor Audio’s remote control app (iOS and Android).

While two-channel audio has been staging something of a fight back of late, the bulk of new product has come from existing manufacturers returning to the category, while new arrivals have tended to be at slightly higher price points than ones we would define as entry level. This makes the duo you see here especially interesting. Not only is Vieta Audio returning to the UK after sufficiently long a period of time that it is new for many people (me included), but the products it is returning with are at the affordable end of the market. The range arriving in the UK is an extensive one.

Tomorrow's world Peachtree Audio’s next-gen iDecco offers an amp, multi-input DAC, head amp and iPod dock all for £1,000 and Ed Selley just loves a good deal. . . Peachtree Audio has already graced the pages of Hi-Fi Choice, when we reviewed the Nova integrated amplifier and DAC.