The sonic character of the 840E/840W combo is neutral in tonality, but in the upper octaves leans a touch towards the cooler end of the spectrum. This is performance that would be impressive at any price. And during Evgeny Kissin’s performance of “The Lark” these electronics also eerily suggest the voluminous, lower-midrange harmonic weight of a grand piano on stage, including an accurate sense of its orientation to the audience. It has the character of a distantly mewing cat, but it is clearly doubling Jones’ voice. Similarly there’s a passage towards the end of Norah Jones’ “Sinking Soon” where she is joined by a second voice at a level so low that it veers toward the inaudible. The complexity of low-level resolution radiating from the responsive crowd could easily be overwhelmed by the high-octane output of the musicians on the stage, but these electronics capture every micro-dynamic nuance. What’s remarkable about the track-beyond the obvious virtuoso musicianship-is the hand clapping of the audience. There’s a wealth of low-level resolving power, easily heard when I listened to Billy Joel’s “Angry Young Man,” which was recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1977. Like the Hubble telescope, the focus of the 840E/W on images is decisive and crystalline deep. Once this was established in my mind, other virtues seemed to fall like dominoes. I heard this during cellist Pieter Wispelwey’s Kol Nidre and then in the opening moments of Shelby Lynne’s “How Can I Be Sure”. In the absence of music it is a quality felt as much as heard, like the texture (and this is crucial) of an unbroken curtain of ambience and atmosphere hanging over the venue itself. They are exceedingly, even weirdly, quiet and settled. Which is to say there is generally an aspect or two of performance that immediately speaks to me. So often first impressions invariably set the table for the entire meal. Its carbon footprint at idle is 180W, not bad when you consider the Pass Labs INT-150 idles at 225W. In heat output it splits the difference between Class A and AB, which is to say it verges on the uncomfortable to the touch. This circuit enables the amplifier to run in Class A at low levels and transition to an “enhanced” Class B without the typical crossover distortion normally associated with Class AB designs. The 840W amplifier uses Cambridge Audio’s proprietary XD topology-the object of a pending patent. In another nod to pushing the high end forward, Cambridge Audio decided to forgo the ubiquitous op-amps normally used for driving low-level gain stages and designed and manufactured its own proprietary TerraPin (signifying ten-pin) discrete modules. Via the “Mode” button there are treble and bass and balance controls, but this circuitry can be bypassed with a push of the “Direct” button. It ratchets up and down with the clatter of a socket wrench but at the end of the day its precision is reassuring. It’s a premium resistor-ladder design with 1dB increments and is relay-based with gold-plated contacts-far more precise and stable over the long run than the typical wiper-style volume pot. The large volume-control knob is in actuality an attenuator-type. The front panel of the 840E preamp is dominated by an LCD display (adjustable for intensity), which is flanked on each side by a vertical row of input buttons. In the case of the 840W, the designers implemented some creative crosshatched venting to aid the amplifier’s thermal efficiency.
Every finished edge is satin smooth, with tight seams corner to corner. The acoustically damped casework is absolutely first-rate with a heavy 7mm front panel of extruded aluminum and aluminum side-panels. And to substantiate this claim, its engineers hereby submit into evidence the Azur 840E preamplifier and 840W power amplifier-separates that make no apologies and stand ready to silence the snobs.īy any high-end standard, the Azur 840E and its 200Wpc partner, the 840W, are elegantly and conservatively styled-appropriate to the segment they aim to compete in. But some companies refuse the pigeonhole and won’t submit to a slot in the pecking order. Even when you’ve been producing exceptional electronics for years, as Cambridge Audio has, the moniker “value high-end” is a stigma that tends to stick. I t’s serious business striving to be taken seriously.
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