There were beautiful women. There were pink socks. There was loud music, expensive alcohol, shameless dancing. There might have been a tiger in the bathroom. It wasn’t like a party in the Music Hall suite—it was a party. The company’s energetic sales manager, Leland Leard, was too busy rocking out, so Roy Hall introduced me to his new A70.2 integrated amplifier ($1499). (Here we see Leland playing DJ; I will spare us the images of Leland on the dance floor.)
Rated to deliver 125Wpc, the dual-mono A70.2 is easily Music Hall’s most powerful amp to date. It uses two large toroidal power transformers, one for each channel, and offers a front-panel iPod input and headphone output, rear-panel RCA and XLRs, a moving-magnet phono stage, preamp output, and home-theater bypass.
The A70.2 was mated to Epos’s Elan 30 loudspeakers ($1999/pair) and EAT’s E-Flat turntable with a gorgeous Yosegi phono cartridge ($7495). We listened to a mix of independent and mainstream dance music—James Blake’s “Limit to Your Love” preceded Lady Gaga’s “Disco Stick”—and the system showed no signs of breaking a sweat, even when pushed to party levels.
