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发表于 2005-11-11 11:35:47
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It's that rare and beautiful thing in hi-fi - the perfect match
Predicting that Sugden electronics and ART loudspeakers would be a marriage made in hi-fi heaven required no great feat of clairvoyance on our part. The companies - which are based in Yorkshire and Scotland
respectively - know it. People at hi-fi shows have heard about it. Sometimes products just click. It's that old black magic called synergy and this beefy bundle of Brit-fi has enough of the stuff to power a small town.
Or certainly heat one. Sugden's Masterclass Integrated amp is a hot product in every sense of the word. You probably know the story here. Sugden loves sweet-sounding Class A amplification like Simon Cowell loves the feeling of belt under armpit. It believes that pure Class A, single-ended operation is sonically superior to all the alternatives. Judging from the exquisite
performance of its smaller integrated, the long-running A21a, it has a strong case. The consequence of this approach, though, is bags of thermal output (enough to warm your hands by on a chilly morning) for a comparatively modest power output. For its flagship integrated amplifier, Sugden has
pushed this up to 34 watts a side; still pretty feeble for a ?K amp, you might think. But when it comes to misleading quotes, the Masterclass integrated leaves Steven Byres for dead. In a good way, as we'll hear.
Another snub to convention is dealt by the Masterclass CD player. Digital evolution has made 24-bit digital to analogue converters almost the de facto standard for up-market machines, but not this one. The way Sugden tells it, 16-bit chipsets still sound best for CD and one particular combination of DAC and filter - Philips TDA 1541 and 7220 - sounds best of all. Hardly bog standard, of course. Both the Philips mechanism and digital circuitry are extensively modified in-house.
Masterclass aesthetics tend towards the butch rather than the beautiful but the no-nonsense functionality and sturdy construction are appealing and the engineering tip-top. The CD player totes both standard single-ended phono sockets and balanced XLR outputs and BNC connections for digital ins/outs and of the amp's four line inputs, one is balanced XLR. There's a moving magnet input for a turntable, too, but the sexiest things on the back panel are the gorgeous fit-all WBT binding posts.
If the brutally unfrilly ART Expression speakers and dedicated sand-filled stands look tough, almost pro-plain, in the supplied battleship grey (though ART will paint them any colour you like to order), they're anything but unsophisticated. Acoustic Reproduction Technology is brothers Derek and Ramsay Dunlop (of Systemdek turntable fame) and the Expression, sans bass module, is the smallest model in their mission to put music-first principles back into speaker design.
Not to imply any daintiness, here. The stands are very heavy and sturdy, the Expressions themselves deep and solidly built. Never mind the width, anyway: ART is on a quality kick and the Expression uses extremely high quality drive units in an effort to recreate realistic scale and dynamics from what, by the standards of this group, is a bijou box.
PERFORMANCE
Ever doubted the maxim "more than the sum of its parts"? You should hear this. Individually, these are all outstanding performers. Together they harmonise like a gospel choir under the direction of Quincy Jones. This is a music-making ensemble - 'hi-fi' seems almost too clinical a term to describe what it does.
But what it does is this: it allows you to forget that CD ever sounded hard and edgy; makes you realise that you don't actually need valves to achieve breathtakingly natural textures and limpid transparency; and convince you that small speakers really can sound big, uncompressed and dynamic.
It's pure relief. This system removes the tenseness from listening to hi-fi. You want to fall into its arms and let it massage your temples. The way it gets you closer to the music is uncanny. On guitarist Martin Taylor's meticulously produced and played Nitelife, new layers of resolution subtly unearth previously unnoticed details. Yet tonal and the unforced transient accuracy just seems so... well, unforced.
No, an exclusive playlist of Mot head won't be well served by the Sugden/ART combo - which isn't to say it can't do loud and muscular. In fact it does it so well, the amp's modest output spec seems ludicrous. It's just that there's so much more it can do to make your day. |
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