Worth the Splurge?

AS A RULE I'm not particularly susceptible to the "audio-jewelry" school of component design; I'm a value/performance guy.

- Daniel Kumin

But I have to allow that Teac's new 700-series components-the UD-701N Network Player and AP-701B Power Amplifier-have a decidedly seductive vibe.

They're compact but dense, beautiful and beautifully finished, and they sound fabulous. Japan's Teac (more correctly "TEAC") has had several incarnations in the U.S. audio marketplace of the past half-century or so. The firm, which arose from the Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company, came to prominence here with its affordable, multitrack openreel (and later, cassette-based) tape recorders, which made studio-like, multi-instrument home recording widely available for the first time, in 1969 and throughout the '70's. (Early adopters included Bob Dylan and The Band, at their famous "Big Pink" basement studio in the Woodstock, NY area, while a decade later Springsteen's "Nebraska" was famously recorded on a Teac multitrack cassette system.) In the mid '70's Teac, with Sony and Philips, launched the Elcaset, a giantsized enclosed-tape format that promised open-reel performance and flexibility with cassette-like convenience.

Sadly, like all too many other examples of technically superior engineering, it launched, bubbled briefly, and sank leaving little trace on the collective audio memory. Teac then became an important purveyor of compact integrated music systems, first cassette and later CD-based, which came to be called "midi" systems. Finally, in the late 20th century and into the current one the firm morphed into an unabashedly high-end audiophile brand, with limited-production separate components under both its own and its Esoteric names.