John Darko
I don’t own a car. I go everywhere by bicycle. The hills of Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg excepted, Berlin is flat enough to make most journeys a breeze. The city also offers a good (if not perfect) network of bike lanes. I’m not a lycra-wearing Sunday morning group rider but I enjoy riding a decent bike. When I buy a new one, I don’t do as many serious bike riders do: buy a frame to add aftermarket wheels, drive train, handlebars and a saddle. No. I buy an off-the-shelf bike that’s ready to ride. Even the 1980s Italian road racer purchased impulsively during the longest of Germany’s pandemic lockdowns was a finished product. Pay n’ go, nothing more to add.
Most other people buy bikes as I do — even the more expensive ones — much to the chagrin of the enthusiasts wanting to teach us about the joys of building a bike piece by piece. What this minority doesn’t (care to) understand is that even if we have the money, we don’t want to make ten purchasing decisions. We only wish to make one. We appreciate the (sometimes) higher quality of a ‘separates’ build but we don’t have the time – or inclination – to research and acquire each piece before fitting it to the frame. Troubleshooting? Fuggedabout it. That’s a job for the manufacturer or bike shop. Our priorities lie elsewhere in life.
Keyboard audiophiles are a lot like bike enthusiasts. They beat the drum for a ‘separates’ build at every opportunity, deaf to the notion that newcomers might not wish to do as they do; and have since the Thatcher/Reagan years. These old-schoolers don’t see the emergence of streaming active loudspeakers and streaming amplifiers – gear that I call Future-Fi – as an expansion of hi-fi’s mainstream appeal but as a threat to their way of doing things. “Get off my lawwwwn!”ย
It’s not just cycling and hi-fi. Visit any forum or Facebook group concerned with cameras or coffee (two other male-dominated pursuits) and you’ll see the same back-to-basics signalling and grumbling about the new. Many camera or coffee enthusiasts have the money to take the path of the purist but don’t have the time or the inclination to do so. It isn’t hard to drop โฌ10k on a pre-built road bike or the same on a camera body and matching lens. (“But have you ever tried knitting your own?”) Only in a black-and-white brain does not wanting to separate the grinder from the espresso machine mean a move to Nespresso. Blinkered opinions that cannot separate hardware choices from self-identity aren’t a coffee thing, a camera thing or a bike thing. They’re a middle-aged-dude-online thing.
And so it goes in hi-fi. Not everyone wants to go on the journey of compiling a ‘separates’ system.
Single-box streaming amplifiers from Cambridge Audio, NAIM, NAD, Bluesound, Denon, Marantz, Technics – and now T+A – are slowly dragging the hi-fi world closer to the car world and away from the bike world: where all the electronics needed to play music through a pair of passive loudspeakers are a) housed in one chassis and b) juiced by one power cable with c) the signal path optimised from input to output by one manufacturer.
And yet: I can already see the Copium comments beneath my forthcoming T+A video:
“What happens when something fails?”ย Yes, the whole unit must be sent in for diagnosis and repair — just as we do with our car, TV or washing machine.
I remember, back in the mid-90s, when my Marantz CD player’s drive mechanism failed, it had to go in for repair. It mattered not one bit that the CD player was separate from the amplifier. The net result was the same: I still couldn’t play music.
“Why would anyone buy a product like T+A’s R 2500 R when you could spend the same money – a whopping โฌ14,500 – on separates?”.ย
Never mind that the enquirer won’t have carried out the necessary side-by-side comparison to see if separates doย sound better, all whilst noting the compromises of a multi-box system.
Never mind that to match the R 2500 R’s functionality one would need to acquire the following separates:
- a power amplifier promising 140wpc into 8 Ohms and 250wpc into 4 Ohms and juiced by an in-house-designed ‘Sinusoidal’ power supply that, according to T+A “combines the sonic advantages of transformer power supplies with the stability of switching power supplies”
- a pre-amplifier with single-ended and balanced XLR inputs, front panel VU meters and stepped-resistor relay volume control
- a DAC with 2 x TOSLINK, coaxial, USB and HDMI ARC inputs with separate decoder pathways for DSD and PCM
- a network streamer that does AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect and (eventually) Roon Ready with Deezer, Qobuz and Amazon Music folded into the partnering app
- a slot-loading CD transport with an in-house designed/built mechanism
- an FM/DAB+ tuner
- a 4.4mm balanced headphone socket fronting a dedicated headphone amplifier circuit
Never mind that we’d also need two analogue interconnects (DAC to pre, pre to power) and two digital interconnects (CD to DAC, streamer to DAC) to tie it all together.
Never mind that we’d need the lounge room space to accommodate up to six boxes and up to six power cables to connect ’em all to the mains.
Never mind that a hi-fi product’s single most expensive ingredient is (usually) its chassis — and the R 2500 R puts everything inside a single anodised-and-brushed aluminium box with a top panel porthole.
Never mind the doublethink of “separates are best” and “the shorter the signal path, the better”.
Never mind that the R 2500 R isn’t aimed at separates-focussed audiophiles but at one-and-done high-end hi-fi buyers – like one-and-done road bike or coffee machine buyers – who rarely bother with comments sections.
If I am wrong, we won’t see any price outrage or “separates are better”-type comments underneath my video review. I will then apologise for taking such a dim view of the online audiophile collective’s intolerance of the new.
Further information: T+A
