The Quad Electro-acoustics Ltd. Artera Solus is a multifunction audio component that was designed to look smart on top of a bureau in a living room or office. It comes with a thick, removable smoked-glass top that complements its compact dimensions. It weighs 25lb, and, in addition to being attractive, feels genuinely solid and well-made. Like its Arteraseries stablemates, the Artera Solus strikes an intriguing engineering and aesthetic balance between decorator-friendly lifestyle product and serious audiophile product worthy of the Quad name.
Description
The Artera Solus was designed by veteran Quad engineer Jan Ertner. It includes a line-level preamplifier, a 75Wpc class-AB power amplifier, a headphone amplifier, a DAC, and a CD transport built by JVC.
The Solus’s front panel floats above the unit’s recessed base and features a 2" circular display with some invisible touch controls. To the right of the display is a CD-loading slot bordered on its right by a rounded-rectangular button for ejecting discs; next to that is a Standby button.
Hidden in the shadowed reveal below the front panel are a 0.25" headphone jack and an infrared receiver for the remote control.
The back panel features two analog (RCA) inputs and five digital inputs: one USB B (Type B), two optical (TosLink), and two RCA jacks. There are also single-ended and balanced analog outputs—one pair of RCA jacks for the former and a pair of XLR sockets for the latter—plus one RCA digital output jack and one TosLink. Stereo pairs of three-way loudspeaker binding posts are provided, along with a threaded input socket for a Bluetooth antenna.
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