Musical Fidelity AI

In 1989, I bought my second pair of Rogers LS3/5a's from a guy on Staten Island who had them hooked up to a Musical Fidelity AI integrated amplifier.

INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER

After playing the speakers for me, he began removing his zip-cord speaker cables and paused to show me how, at the amplifier end, his red-plastic Pomona Electronics banana plugs had partially melted from the Al's heat. We both laughed.

After it first appeared in 1985, the AI quickly became famous for its hot top plate. The top plate got as hot as it did because it was used as a heatsink for the output transistors, which were biased highly into class-A. The Al's hot top made tabloid headlines, but for me it was its bold, sinewy, un-transistory sound and timeless, sharply drawn styling that distinguished it from cooler running Brit-fi competitors such as Audiolab's 8000A, Creek's 4040, A&R Cambridge's A60, and NAD's 3020.

Despite the Daily Mirror headlines, it was the Al's all-natural sonics-not its top-plate temperature-that made it an instant classic.

Now it's back, looking and feeling cooler than before.

As I type this, it is 85°F in my room, and I just held my palm 1" from the Al's chassis-top heatsink and could barely feel heat rising up-maybe none at all. Using a digital oven thermometer, I measured the chassis-top temperature at 140.1°F (60°C): too warm for toddler fingers but 5° cooler than the original's design-specified heatsink temperature of 65°Celsius.

History

My introduction to Musical Fidelity's tuneful aesthetic began in the late 1970s, when Anthony Michaelson ran a company called Michaelson & Austin, which was selling EL34 tube amplifiers designed by the first audio designer I christened a "Tall Wizard," my soon-to-be friend and Triode Mafia brother Tim de Paravicini. Tim's design for the TVA-10 was a testament to our shared belief that in any properly designed audio amplifier, tubes and transistors sound alike. I believe Tim's design for Musical Fidelity's Al proved that point.