Integrated Amplifiers

The trend for 'anniversary' products – witness the plethora of celebratory hardware on display at this year's High End show – continues with Rotel's new Diamond Series. Released to mark 60 years since the brand launched, it comprises the £3999 RA-6000 integrated amplifier and £1999 DT-6000 CD player. Not the hefty additions to the Michi lineup you might have expected, these are instead very much classic Rotel designs (fitting, as the traditionalist brand is not one to hop on every new fad that comes along) albeit with trickle-down technology from its flagship stablemates.

Expect the unexpected: it will be the first lesson in the book if I ever get round to writing Hi-Fi Reviewing For Dummies. You see, just because something seems like something else, it doesn't follow that it is... Too many times I've stumbled across a speaker sitting in the middle of a range, and apparently using the same recipe of drive-units, that turns out to be a complete outlier – for good or bad – in the way it plays music. The same happens with amplifiers, too. So, just because one model seems little more than a bigger version of another, don't expect it to have the same kind of balance of qualities, only 'more so'.

These days, the letter 'i' included in a product name will have some people assuming there are networking features onboard – blame BBC iPlayer or Apple iTunes, I suppose. It's therefore worth stressing that Simaudio's £1900 MOON 250i is an all-analogue integrated amplifier (that's what the 'i' stands for here, of course), lacking digital connectivity and DAC, or any networking talents whatsoever. If this counts as an old-school approach, then there's at least one good reason for it – the 250i has now been in the Canadian company's stable for a decade.

Is it unkind to suggest some Italian brand names do not carry convincingly into English? Who keeps a straight face with a cooker called 'SMEG'? As for Synthesis – which also has the appropriately named Roma range – choosing to dub its Metropolis integrated amplifiers 'NYC', because New York is a Metropolis, actually makes sense, I suppose.

As the latest in a long line of amplifiers from the German brand, T+A's PA 1100 E integrated is also one of the more innovative and comprehensive in its scope. The company (T+A stands for 'Theory and Application') has been manufacturing audio equipment since 1978 and prides itself on both its deep technical capability and in-house manufacturing. However, despite this heritage, the PA 1100 E is only the first of its amplifiers to include an onboard DAC – something very many competing brands have been doing for years.