Go your own way

A new Roksan amp is rare, but Attessa also marks the start of a new piece of technology sharing. Ed Selley judges the results

- Ed Selley

Back in 2016, it made a lot of sense for Monitor Audio to buy the Roksan brand. For a company like MA, securing an up-and-running range of products that offered scope to partner its speakers made sense and gaining a well-respected brand name was logical too. For Roksan's part, the benefits of being taken over by a company with the resources of Monitor Audio gave scope for it to access technology and production processes that it would have struggled to achieve on its own.

The Attessa range features the first all-new products launched by Roksan since the takeover. The four-strong lineup includes a CD transport and turntable as well as two amplifiers, the more affordable of which combines digital and analogue inputs - although the more expensive of the two is the more interesting design. The Attessa Streaming Amp takes the same platform as the basic version, but adds on-board streaming and is equipped with the same BluOS interface that has underpinned NAD and Bluesound devices for a number of years. On a pragmatic level, it means that Roksan gains access to a comprehensive, stable and effective streaming platform that otherwise would have taken a huge amount of blood, sweat and tears to try and develop in-house. It also means that the Attessa will happily join a series of existing BluOS components. Like other BluOS devices, sample rate handling is limited to 24-bit/192kHz with no DSD support - but you do get MQA compatibility for both the streaming module and digital inputs.