Pre/Power Amplifiers

Interviewing Rotel's CTO, Daren Orth, during the course of this review, the first question was clear – why Michi, and why now? 'The original Rotel Michi series was launched in the mid '90s and was mainly aimed at the home (Japanese) market despite quickly achieving a global reputation', says Daren. 'Twenty-five years later we felt there was nothing of this quality currently in the market, so we embarked on a three-year project to develop a series of completely new and dedicated electronic designs that combine superlative performance with real overall value.'

The parent brand, Rotel, is no slouch when it comes to value-oriented engineering, so how is Michi different from Rotel? 'It would have been easy to simply build a bigger, better Rotel', says Daren, 'however, this would not have been true to the heritage of those original Michi products'. In practice, Rotel's engineers returned to the archives to gain an insight into those 1990s designs before re-imagining them through the lens of modern power supply, digital processing, audiophile component and PCB layout technologies. So where does it go from here?

'The current Michi products are only the beginning – our engineering teams are actively engaged in extending this platform and new models are scheduled for launch later this year. Michi will also extend to digital sources and other options but we don't currently have firm timings on a launch for those products.' Watch this space!