Integrated Amplifiers

While there is a drive to bring (hi-fi) manufacturing back home to Blighty, some brands never left. One such stalwart is Edwards Audio, a sub-brand of the longstanding Talk Electronics range of full-width components. The Edwards Audio IA1 integrated amplifier on these pages is handmade in the UK – yes, designed, engineered and assembled here – and yet costs just £430. Still not convinced? Well, you can have a simpler version of the same amp, shorn of remote control, for £60 less, and you can even buy both versions in red, white or blue – but not all three at once – as part of a range of six acrylic colours in which Edwards Audio offers its full stable of products.

Well, this is rather confusing: look up the Emotiva BasX TA-100, which sells in the UK through Karma Audio Visual for £519, on its US-based manufacturer's website, and you'll find it appears under 'Preamps'. In fact Emotiva has a stack of preamps, and even more power amps, in its unusually extensive catalogue.

You shouldn't even need to see the £1099 price tag of Emotiva's BasX TA2 to understand it's one of the American manufacturer's entry-level products: the clue is in the name. Yet this integrated amplifier is about more than just covering off the 'basics', not least as it's positioned as a step up from the £669 BasX TA1 [HFN Nov '22].

Nostalgia doesn't come any better than this: an integrated amplifier that looks like it escaped from the 1980s, all minimalist and line-level and 440mm wide. But Exposure has been around for close to 50 years, so this isn't some exercise in retro from an arriviste brand with cod heritage. Rather, the 3510 is a device for reminding people like me of (hi-fi) life in simpler times.

Hybrid amps have always amused me. I still dream of Radford's TT100. This hi-fi equivalent of grafting two plant species hopes – ideally – to combine the best of a brace of disparate technologies. Too often, they marry the worst. Extraudio's X250T represents a first for me in that it promises to take efficient, compact Class D amplification and endow it with the sonic virtues of Class A, hence Class AD. Which made me think of playing with Krells way back in 1985.

Alot can happen in three years, and while the amplifier we have here is very much the smaller sibling of the DIA-400S [HFN Oct '16], it's also boosted by the inclusion of the Danish company's NPM module, a complete network audio solution giving access to a wide range of streaming options.