Simply Powerful

Parasound NewClassic 200 Integrated Amplifier

- Daniel Kumin

I LIKE SIMPLE. Simple is good. Simple works. Simple makes my job easier and helps me sleep at night.

Parasound, a Bay Area maker with a half-century of success walking the parapet between high-end audiophilia and value-engineering design, apparently concurs. The company’s new NewClassic 200 Integrated is, as you might well guess, an integrated amplifier, with a high-quality onboard digital-to-analog converter section. The 200 Integrated was in fact derived by the simple expedient of sliding a class-D stereo power amp sourced from Danish class-D amp-module stalwart Pascal Audio into its otherwise-identical preamp stablemate. This slim, two-channel module delivers a claimed 110 watts per channel into either 4-ohm or 8-ohm loads with typical class-D efficiency, pulling only a modest 50 watts from the wall.

Simple, in this case, does not mean stripped-down, however— not hardly. The Parasound is well-constructed on an oldfashioned steel chassis and nicely but unfussily finished. The amp’s D/A converter, a 24-bit/192kHz design borrowed from the company’s well-regarded Halo P 5 preamplifier(discontinued) is limited to 96kHz from its USB input but tops out at 192kHz from optical or coaxial digital connections.