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Pioneer A-50 AmplifierHaving spent a good few years making fi ne plasma TVs and multi-channel music systems, Pioneer has come back to two-channel, applying its usual high standards along the way. The A-50 boasts excellent finish allied to a wide range of features, plus an awful lot of power - on paper at least. 90W RMS is claimed, making it one of the most powerful here. This is possible at the price due to the use of Class D, which is a less expensive way of getting power, not least because it's more efficient and doesn't require costly heat sinks. Bafflingly though, the A-50 is still a big, heavy beast. To unearth its sonic potential, you'll need a decent deck. Thankfully there are plenty of new top-quality spinners to chose from.
Feature wise, it's very similar to the Yamaha A-S201 - it's almost as if those two Japanese manufacturers were following one another! This means tone controls, a wide range of inputs including moving magnet phono and source direct mode, which bypasses the bass, treble and balance adjusters. There's also a Power Amp Direct Mode, useful for multi-channel systems. Internally, short signal paths are used together with selected passive components such as Schottky barrier diodes. Special attention has been paid to grounding the manufacturer says, and the power supply is isolated.
The Pioneer is a fair performer at the price, giving a little away in its ability to make music fun compared with the others here. Much like its more expensive A-70 brother - it has a pleasingly smooth and even tonal balance with no nasties. To get this sort of grown up sound from an amplifier of this price would have been amazing 10 years ago. All its sins are those of omission; rather than having areas of howling incompetence, such as a horribly fierce treble or vague, pendulous bass, that transforms the fundamentals of the music, the Pioneer simply doesn't do some things as well as most of the rivals in this roundup. Taken in isolation, it's a perfectly pleasant performer and you'd be happy to live with it on a daily basis.
For example, the Kraftwerk track shows how it can set up a decently involving groove and keep the song moving along. It has a fair amount of detail too, but ultimately its midband sounds both a little nasal and congested, and rather two dimensional spatially. Still, nothing it does here is unpleasant; Computer World rattles along at a decent pace, pulling the listener in to a surprising degree. There is a fair amount of scale to the sound, and it doesn't appear to shrink as the volume is turned up. Indeed, under duress the Pioneer remains cool as cucumber, with little sense of strain until things get very loud. If you're really going to criticize the A-50, it's the lack of micro dynamics that lets the side down; on Randy Crawford it seems to sit on the stronger rhythmic accents of the song more than the Cambridge Audio Azur 651A or Marantz PM6005. This gives a slightly flatter and less intense sound than you can get from the best of the rest, but it still makes a nice enough noise. A big value amplifier, but not the best sounding. |