Integrated Amplifiers

Denon's PMA-A110 is no ordinary 80W integrated. Its unique technical 'fingerprint' begins with a very high – too high for modern line sources – overall gain of +45.5dB, but with its novel volume circuit still achieves a phenomenally wide 95dB A-wtd S/N ratio (re. 0dBW). Load tolerance is exceptional too, with its 80W/160W 8/4ohm power rating being met at 2x93W and 2x180W into 8 and 4ohm loads. This 'stiff' PSU means that while there's little additional headroom under dynamic conditions there is the current available (24.9A for 10msec at <1% THD) to support a full 95W, 184W, 346W and 618W into 8, 4, 2 and 1ohm loads, respectively. So tough speaker loads will be driven with comparative ease [see Graph 1, below]. Finally there's its unusual distortion behaviour – stepping up from a very low 0.0009% below 5W/8ohm (the 100W idle draw suggests a Class A bias) to a higher 0.025-0.033% from 10W-80W/8ohm (all at 1kHz). Only under dynamic conditions is distortion uniformly low up to the point of clipping [as illustrated in Graph 1].

Denon's partnering DCD-A110 player offers a 2.34V output (a lower 2.07V with SACD) coupled with a deeply impressive 111dB A-wtd S/N ratio, ±0.5dB resolution over a 120dB range and distortion that's just 0.0001-0.0019% with CD and 0.00009-0.045% with SACD (20Hz-20kHz). Once again, the latest version of Denon's 'Ultra AL32 processing' reveals itself as an adaptive upsampling/filter algorithm – with entirely transient signals it eliminates any pre/post ringing but trades this against an early treble roll-off (–1.6dB/10kHz to –6.7dB/20kHz with CD/48kHz media), while with continuous music signals the filter adopts a steep roll-off (±0.0dB/10kHz to –2.2dB/20kHz). PM