Copland CTA-506 (£4498)

摘要

Lest we forget, much of the audiophile fraternity of the latter half of the 20th century was not particularly sad to see the end of glowing glass bottles - synonymous as they had become with size, weight, expense and unreliability. History, they'd assumed, was linear and thermionic valves would surely be well and truly part of it... Not so, it seems. As vinyl has shown us, it's hard to keep a good technology down, and as far as the task of amplifying small electrical signals into larger ones goes, valves still have something to offer. Copland's Ole Moller believes this, but rather than sell nostalgia to pipe and slipper equipped stick-in-the-muds who polish their EL34s and secretly hanker for the return of the Home Service, he's come up with a brave new design purposed to run KT120 power valves - a new variant of the ubiquitous 6550/KT88 beam tetrode.