Sasha Matson

In my house, I have a little stack of CDs that I bring out once a year—for Christmas Eve and Christmas day. I then put them away on the shelf until the following year. This annual Festival of Christmas Albums is met with varying degrees of pleasure and resignation by the family members present; listening is non-negotiable, though we may not make it through all of them. Once in a while a new Christmas album will make the cut and be added to the stack, but not every year.

But when you look at a Rolls or a Bentley, you immediately recognize it for what it is, and you want to sit down in it. And so it is with McIntosh, except you don't want to sit down in it; you want to sit down in front of it, between the speakers of the hi-fi system it occupies.

The C12000 is McIntosh's current flagship preamplifier. It's part of McIntosh's Hybrid Drive series of products that combine tubes and transistors in interesting ways.

This dialectic can sometimes play out within the same company. Abbingdon Music Research (AMR), which is based in Southport, UK, was founded in 2000. At first, under the AMR brand, the company focused on high-end audio component separates with price points toward the upper end of the spectrum. The world has a way of intervening, though, even with the best-laid business plans. AMR Director Vince Luke describes in a video how his company made a deliberate choice to "pivot from high end to low end" following the financial crash of 2008. AMR's iFi Audio division debuted at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in 2012, offering a handful of portable products. They were a hit. The iFi line has since expanded to include more than 50 designs, and new products are introduced with impressive frequency.