Slick and smart Swedish receiver

Mark Craven is blown away by the music and movie skills of Primare's luxuriously styled nine-channel AVR

Earlier this year we looked at the A35.8 from Primare (HCC #331), a multichannel power amp that signalled the Swedish brand was turning its attention once again to the cinematic side of the home audio business. And if that model had niche appeal, its new SPA25 AVR is more mass-market - albeit with a £5,000 price tag.

A glance over the specifications shows this receiver has been designed to cover all (well, nearly all) of the modern home cinema bases, while retaining the audiophile air of Primare's catalogue of two-channel hardware. So it offers Dolby Atmos and DTS:X decoding, Dirac room correction and Dolby Vision and HDR10+ passthrough, in conjunction with Primare's bespoke network audio platform (Prisma) and some hi-fi centric touches.

Perhaps a better way to look at the SPA25 is to highlight what it doesn't do, and most notably this is offer support for console gamers with 4K/120 playback and VRR ambitions. The unit's HDMI stage (four inputs and two outputs) is HDMI 2.0b, and pegged to 4K/60.

Primare, anticipating some gnashing of teeth from potential customers, is up-front about the reason for this feature shortfall. 'This design choice was made purposefully, as when we began the design effort a number of years ago now, we lacked confidence in the then-available chipsets being able to provide the performance claimed and being readily available for a small manufacturer like us, particularly given current supply shortages. The company says that 'in hindsight' this was a smart move, as the first HDMI 2.1 chips were flawed.