VAC Master Preamplifier/Signature 200iQ

摘要

With the Valve Amplification Company, aka VAC, now 30 years old, it qualifies as a stalwart of the 'third wave'. The first was, of course, the original golden age generation of Marantz, Quad, Mclntosh and others of the 1940s and 1950s, while the second wave hit in the early 1970s with Audio Research, EAR and other tube revivalists. VAC arrived at the point when tubes were demonstrably here to stay, Kevin Hayes founding the company with his father in 1990. He was, and remains, resolutely focused on the high-end, as this pairing's £69,000 cost attests. That, it must be noted, includes the addition of the optional MM/MC phono stage at £ 12,000 on top of the Master Preamplifier's £28,000 base cost. Here we are using a brace of Signature 200iQ amps at £14,500 apiece, in monoblock guise, while VAC also offers the dearer Statement line should you have, say, a Russian oligarch's disposable income.