[EDIT: This first bit is in reply to the original poster!]
It's in the latest issue, as part of a comparative test.
Fairly well regarded, but pipped by the Pioneer LX83 for five stars.
I had a demo at Sevenoaks SAV in Maidstone the other day. I was mostly interested in the music side of things as I'm still looking for a one-box solution for my lounge, only had an hour or so for the demo and figured that if the amp was good enough for stereo music, any multi-channel movie performance would be a bonus, so concentrated on that. It was set up with CM8s and fed using a Sonos, so prepared for it to blow my socks off. I believe it was a digital connection from the Sonos, so the internal DAC(s?) were being used. I wasn't hugely familiar with a lot of the demo music on their Sonos as it was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment demo, but there were a few tracks there that I was pretty familiar with.
The system sounded very good on slower, more open tracks and vocals. Bass wasn't hugely evident, but there was enough there to round out the bottom end of a lot of the music, and I don't know how they had their little sub set up. A very pleasant listen.
When we switched up to some faster music, though, it all seemed to fall apart a wee bit. A track that totally messes with the midrange of my system at home is Muse's Assassin (think a bit like Iron Maiden doing a cover of the Knight Rider theme!). Now, my system at home is what you would consider budget - essentially a Dacmagic feeding a CA 640A (v1) paired with Kef IQ5SEs. This has given me a great deal of pleasure so far, but it does have a tendency to be a bit bright, and coupled with a large expanse of open wooden floor, tracks like this are less than a pleasure to listen to.
I was expecting this setup, in a dedicated demo room with all the attendant tweaks - well-placed wall hangings and baffles, not to mention a *perfectly* positioned couch - to rather tear my system to shreds. But the fact is, that it didn't. Assassin was almost as muddied in the midrange as it is on my home system, and I listened to it as a comparative exercise rather than for any kind of pleasure. the demo system seemed to be like this for any very busy music.
Overall, I came away pretty underwhelmed, I have to say. The guys at sevenoaks seemed to think that it was likely to be a source issue, rather than the setup itself, and I didn't have the time to persist with separate sources, or something like an external DAC.
I'd be really interested to hear other people's experiences too, as I had expected much greater things from this system.
In the meantime, I went away, patting myself on the back for saving myself 1800 squids! Still on the lookout for an upgrade to the 640A, tho...
Cheers!
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