Let's keep it succinct.
Significant £1500 ish integrated amp from Rega. Been waiting a while. So . . . is it any good?
Straight answer: Yes it is. You want me to elucidate?
Receiving the amp last Thursday, we plugged it in and finally got around to playing with it on Saturday. With none of the new Rega RS speakers here at the time (it was the tweeters, you know) and only an unplayed pair of bright red R5s to hand, we decided to use the trusty Kudos C10 stand-mount speakers. CD player was the Rega Saturn and a pile of cables, mainly from Nordost, had us up and running. We used the Isoblue stands.
Using the excellent-but-affordable Mira 3 as a reference point, we had the feeling that whilst it was a pleasant enough music system, the little amp was struggling to take control of the loudspeakers. The Peter Gabriel tracks being played (from 'UP') were quite enjoyable but the poor guy sounded just a little strained.
Switching to the Elicit brought about a dramatic shift. PG sounded a lot more healthy, in fact every aspect of the recordings sounded far more together. Scale, vibrancy and dynamics came with a level of detail retrieval that was just a tad unnerving. Our judgement at this point: four times the Brio for under three times the price.
Playing with cables brought us back to the Heimdall interconnect / Red Dawn speaker cable regime but a tiny hint of aggression had led us to question some aspects of the sound enough to have experimented. To be fair the amplifier was only 36 hrs old. Still, queue a change of equipment rack.
Mark Orr of Something solid had lent us an example of his new modular rack (pictures to follow) so equipped in its most expensive suspended balsa-laminated guise we moved the equipment over from the Isoblue.
Wow.
We are used to playing far more expensive systems but this was genuinely amazing. There was some lovely stuff going on in the percussion that was up there with the best of them. The musicality (top to bottom), the scale. . . the works. No more 'tizz' and a lot more colour. Absolutely stunning.
Weaknesses? Well, the amp is happiest not being pushed too hard. It was able to play loudly and by virtue of being so clean and composed, it was probably louder than it seemed, but thunderous head-banging levels are not its thing. Subtlety, a lightness of touch, and a hear-through nature rather reminiscent of Shahinians and the Well Tempered turntable (sorry about the comparisons, Mr Gandy) are what it's about. And for an exceptionally natural and transparent presentation at a sensible price, the Elicit should be high on any-ones audition list. Maybe even at the top. This is a very grown-up product.
On the added plus side, it is utterly spell-binding at low levels, a very useful quality. And please don't assume that it is all that restricted in loudness. The Kudos' are not all that efficient and clean undistorted sounds never seem loud. Besides, the 'normal' system involves a NAC 552 and NAP500. Twenty times the price and just a wee bit more gutsy.
Results like this bode well for these new RS speakers . . .
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