The AHB2 is a lovely chunky thing, mine is in a brushed black aluminium finish, the cooling fins are to the sides but don’t seem to heat up much, despite the compact nature of the set-up. The boxing of these three elements is very heavy and well up to scratch. I’m getting more and more into the idea of getting the best box for a single job, so this system test is right up my street. Other Benchmark DACs have pre-amplifiers and headphone amplifiers that I am not interested in. The final element in this Benchmark system is a DAC3 B, which is simply Benchmark’s DAC with no bells and whistles. My source in this Benchmark system test is, in fact, a Bluesound Node 2i as a streaming transport connected with a Coaxial audio cable from Chord. It is a stripped out Benchmark HA4 that I reviewed recently, it was gorgeous. It does very little other than connect the source to the amplifier with a gain knob in the middle. Indeed the key element that Benchmark focusses on is the cleanliness of the signal path, as evidenced by the Specs below that centre on minimal noise. This is all in the design with Benchmark using a hybrid Class A/B design that uses revolutionary THX-patented AAA™ technology to virtually eliminate all forms of distortion. This Benchmark system is characterised by its compact size it is nearly half the width of a standard HiFi separate, indeed the AHB2 (just under 30 cm wide) seems amazingly small given the power it seems to be chucking out. The system I have here is the Benchmark AHB2 Power amplifier (retailing near £3,300), a Benchmark LA4 pre-amplifier (£2,750) and a Benchmark DAC3 B (£1,900, total cost near £7,950, excluding cables and speakers, etc.). So with this in mind, I am very interested to see how this Benchmark system stacks up (literally) against the outgoing Naim Supernait 3, ND5 XS2 with the same speaker and cable set-up. However, as several years go by and I’ve experienced premium systems from the likes of T+A (HV), Rega, Moon and now Benchmark, I do get the original premise and I may have taken a different path as I’ve expressed many times.Īt the end of the day, this is all very subjective as we know and all of this equipment is rather good in broad terms, it is mostly about your perception of tone and then the interaction with the equipment (Naim’s App is still poor, Moon’s better, Auralic is great, BluOS is still my preferred interface). To some extent, I am less concerned about this view because I like the Naim sound and I have invested so much of my time and money into the glowing green logos of Naim Classic Series. "In measuring the AHB2 and attempting to confirm its specified (very) high signal/noise ratio, JA observed nonlinearities in his testing equipment that "haven't affected the measured performance of other amplifiers I've tested, but they were detectable with the AHB2's very low intrinsic distortion and noise." His conclusion: "an extraordinary amplifier.This is my HiFi Review of an all in Benchmark system, the Benchmark DAC3 B with an LA4 pre-amplifier and the flagship 100Wpc AHB2 power amplifier.Ī few years ago a good friend of mine mocked Naim as a middle of the road English HiFi Brand, and I was incredulous. "An extraordinary amplifier"- John Atkinson, Stereophile Burdick, the engineer whose work formed the basis for its design, Benchmark's AHB2 makes use of THX Corporation's Achromatic Audio Amplifier (AAA) technology, in which a low-power feed-forward amplifier drives a low-bias class-AB output section." "In his listening tests KR discovered "much more apparent low-level detail in already-familiar recordings"-a characteristic he credited to the Benchmark's evident noiselessness-and a tonal balance that "sounded more 'right' than any of.
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