Integrated Amplifiers

Hailing from Treviso in northeast Italy, Unison Research is a brand with an obvious love of tubes, to the point that you half expect to find a hot bottle or two incorporated in its Malibran and Max loudspeakers. Its CD players, the Unico CD Uno and Due [HFN May ’16], have tube-based output stages, while the solid-state amps in the same series have tube-based inputs. But the company is best known for its all-tube amplifiers, of which there are 15 spread across integrated, pre and power ranges.

Denon updates its AV receivers at the drop of a hat, but its stereo amplifiers typically enjoy a far longer shelf-life. Side-stepping its 110th anniversary PMA-A110 model [HFN Dec ’20] for a moment, the brand’s previous flagship, the PMA-2500NE [HFN Aug ’16], illustrates this longevity. Nonetheless, there’s a direct line between the PMA-A110 and the £2999 PMA-3000NE tested here, as numerous hardware tweaks devised for that limited edition model underpin Denon’s new stereo integrated.

As the EISA Awards jury noted this year [HFN Oct ’24], AV furniture is ‘often overlooked… but has a crucial part to play’. Monitor Audio would agree, and having acquired Blok in 2019, it has launched a redesigned Stax 2G system this summer. Retaining its predecessor’s wooden box-like supports and full-width shelves, the improved modular form-factor promises to be easier to configure and assemble.

The term ‘game-changing’ is widely overused, but it’s fully justified in the case of Naim’s original Naim Uniti. Launched in 2009, it was in the vanguard of CD/streaming/amplifier products, a concept now more widely adopted in the past decade and a half. And in the 15 years since the original Naim Uniti appeared, the company has continuously developed the technology inside the series, not to mention spinning it off into component network players and its Mu-so network speaker systems.

This pre/power system from the boutique UK marque benefits from its designer’s attention to detail and tube know-how, says Dave Berriman

Every so often, you stumble across something a bit special. Well, ‘stumble’ is perhaps not quite the right word, but I did hear a rather captivating sound coming from the GATE room at one of the UK’s smaller audio shows a year or two ago, and then again at the Heathrow-based Hi-Fi News Show last year.

With the H600’s streaming/DAC platform at its heart the new H400 – dubbed the ‘Streamliner’ by Hegel – looks set to take over as the sweet spot of the range

When Hegel’s reference H600 integrated amplifier [HFN Oct ’23] arrived to replace the H590 [HFN Oct ’18] last summer, it didn’t require much insight into the hi-fi industry to guess that the H390 [HFN Aug ’19] would also be marching in the general direction of the exit soon enough. It’s taken a year, though, before the replacement H400 – aka the ‘Streamliner’ – eventually pulled into port.

PS Audio’s new Stellar Strata MK2 amplifier looks – at first glance – identical to the original Stellar Strata [HFN Mar ’21], save the ‘MK2’ lettering now added to its fascia. The slender chassis, offered in silver or black and a feature of all Stellar series hardware, is retained, as is the slim text display, right-side volume rotary and headphone output of its predecessor. So from the off, it’s clear that any changes made for this second-generation design are under the hood.