Best Premium Stereo Amplifier 2024 - What Hi-Fi?
Five Stars – What Hi-Fi?
Five Stars – the-ear.net
"A Terrific Proposition and Has to be Heard"
It looks fabulous, and the sound quality is every bit as amazing as you would expect from Rega. The new Rega Aethos stereo amplifier is housed in a brand new, custom designed case. Employing four 160 watt, 16 amp output transistors per channel, it delivers 156 watts-per-channel into 6 Ohms.
"Its Sense of Timing Is Second io None"
"The Rega Aethos delivers a fantastic combination of insight, dynamics and rhythmic precision to produce a class-leading sound at this serious level," reports What Hi-Fi?, which named the Aethos its Best Premium Stereo Amplifier 2024. Its sense of timing is second to none at this price, which is part of the reason it is a current What Hi-Fi? Awards winner."
"Extra Clarity, Precision and Muscle"
The Aethos is a dual mono design using a custom-wound toroidal transformer and regulated supplies for the sensitive amplification and driver stages. The preamplifier stage uses class-A discrete circuitry throughout. The Aethos is a no-compromise designed product with one and only one goal in mind: to deliver your music as faithfully as possible.
"The Aethos retains all the verve of the company’s established affordable integrateds, but adds a huge dose of extra clarity, precision and muscle to the recipe," reports What Hi-Fi?, which gave the Aethos a top rating of Five Star in an October 5, 2021 review. "The power amp’s circuit is designed to offer the benefits of Class A operation without the usual drawbacks in terms of heat and power consumption… The Aethos is a terrific proposition and has to be heard."
"It is a very musical and compelling amplifier that makes you want to listen longer and, dare I say it, louder, which is one of life’s great pleasures after all," notes Jason Kennedy, the-ear.net, December 9, 2019, giving the Aethos a Five Star top rating. "Add to this very high build quality, a good selection of analogue in- and outputs and you have a classic amplifier, built for sound quality first. What more do you really need?"
Design Innovation
Rega's time, effort and money have been spent on developing the circuit and construction, utilizing the highest specification of components throughout. As part of the design, Rega included useful features such as the switchable direct input and preamplifier output, to enable the Aethos to be used in a wide combination of systems.
Rega has taken the design concepts underpinning the multi award-winning and hugely successful Elex-R and Elicit-R and propelled the performance to the next level and beyond with a 125-watt dual mono design with features such as fully discrete FET based line amplifier, polypropylene capacitors throughout the signal path, K-Power reservoir capacitors, power amplifier regulated supply, and a high current output stage comprising of four 160-watt Sanken output transistors per channel.
Audiophile Headphone Output
The Aethos includes an audiophile-quality headphone output capable of driving all standard hi-fi headphones and engineered to match most commonly used headphones. The headphone output has been integrated such that the speaker switching is performed by the output mute relay as so not to obstruct the signal path and degrade the sound quality.
Remote with Motorized Volume Control
Here is a great feature that you don't see very often in today's audio gear: a motorized volume control. The volume of the amplifier can be adjusted using the volume control knob on the amplifier and very conveniently via the included remote control. The control is motorized and will independently move when the remote is used to control the volume.
DC Coupled Outputs
One of the design requirements of the Aethos was to keep the capacitors in the signal path to a minimum to prevent sound degradation. In order to achieve this requirement, the outputs of both the preamplifier and power amplifier (speaker) are DC coupled. A servo control is applied to the preamplifier. In the unlikely event of a circuit failure causing any one of the above outputs to produce an excessive DC voltage, the DC protection will activate within milliseconds, protecting any connected device.
