Audio Research VM220

摘要

When Audio Research first started selling valve amplifiers some 35 years ago, the genre was already obsolete - having been ousted by technically superior transistorised amplifiers. To some observers it must have seemed about as logical as re-introducing the steam car or the Zeppelin airship, but to founder William Z Johnson, it would have been entirely logical. Transistor amplifiers were both lighter and cheaper watt-for-watt than valve-based designs, but there were dark mutterings from a hard-core of audiophiles and music lovers who opined that valves offered a certain sonic something that the upstart transistors didn't and, 35 years later, the debate still goes onln the meantime, the brand has gone from strength to strength and is one of the few North American audiophile manufacturers still in business making the same kind of high-quality, or high-end equipment - and all without pandering to shifting fashion. Indeed, Audio Research Corporation has adhered firmly to a winning formula - build quality to die for and sound quality to match. It still builds the stuff like it used to, with casework featuring chunky panels of finely-finished anodised aluminium and thick black paint. The appearance of its products is more akin to laboratory instrumentation than domestic sound reproducing equipment, but this is the much-loved classic Audio Research look. As is usual in life, quality does not come cheap and the price of these two monoblocks, at £4500 each in the UK, would pay for a perfectly good new family car. Add the price of the reference pre-amp I used with it, at a pound under £10k, and that could buy a good luxury car.