An evening with Halcro

Lowest distortion amplifiers

By Michael Jones

January 2005 issue

 

Many readers of hi-fi magazines think that reviewers sit around all day playing with esoteric pieces of hi-fi. That’s not true – the chance to see, let alone hear truly expensive hi-fi equipment comes around rarely for hi-fi writers in New Zealand.

So when Romesh Anandaraja of Hamilton’s The Listening Post told me that he was importing the Halcro range of amplifiers I was all ears. And when he invited me down to Hamilton to have a play with the amplifiers, I didn’t need to be asked twice.

Over dinner in a very nice Hamilton eatery (I didn’t know such things existed in Hamilton, said with my best JAFA sneer) Romesh explained a bit about Halcro to me.

Would you like specifications with that?

Audiophiles who have been around the block a couple of times may remember the great specifications wars of the 1970s, when every mainstream manufacturer appeared to be competing with lower and lower distortion specifications.

The trouble was, the amplifiers were sounding worse and worse. It wasn’t that distortion was inherently good for sound; rather the problem was that the methods used to lower measured distortion were screwing up the sound.

After ignoring distortion measurements for years, it may be time for audiophiles to take notice of them again. Halcro amplifiers have a measured distortion level of 0.0001% - that’s 1000 parts per billion!

On the platter

Romesh was brave (or maybe foolhardy) in importing Halcro amplifiers into his Hamilton store. The Halcro combination – a DM10 preamp and two DM58 monoblock power amplifiers – retail for around $90,000. That’s $30,000 for the DM10 and $30,000 for each DM58.

Yes, it’s true – the rich really are different from the rest of us. They can afford such amplifiers, while poor audio scribes merely get to look and listen to them for an evening.

All back to his house

Romesh had the Halcro amplifiers set up at home, along with some other exotic gear. The front end was the Wadia 861 Standard CD player. You need to see one in the flesh to realise how big and imposing this CD player is. At the other end of the Halcro amplifiers was pair of Infinity IRS Gamma loudspeakers, a large five-way system with a number of Infinity’s flat panel EMIT and EMIM drivers used from the upper bass on upwards. This system was placed in a rather large, rectangular room.

The entire system (and room, for that matter) were completely new to me, so the impressions I gained covered more than just the Halcro amplifiers.

The system as a whole sounded incredibly clean and grain free. Not clean, as in “sterile” but instead the sound was free of the hints of graininess that can easily afflict even the most expensive stereo systems. Was this due to the Halcro’s vanishingly tiny distortion measurements? Who knows?

Romesh played a couple of audiophile recordings for me. As usual, they sounded wonderful. But as usual, there was very little going on musically. I was more interested in seeing how this system handled the 99.9999% of recordings that weren’t so well recorded. Many “high-end” systems make a complete mess of poorly recorded albums. In contrast this system based around the Halcro amps performed beautifully: I was aware that the recording wasn’t perfect, but the system didn’t allow that to interfere with the musical message.

Gratuitous plug

If you want to hear the Halcro amplifiers then contact Romesh Anandaraja of The Listening Post, Hamilton. The phone number is 07-839 0135 and their address is 657 Victoria Street, Hamilton.