I do take great pains to use associated equipment that seems, according to my judgment, to be more nearly perfect than most, but I freely acknowledge that the best I can do when reviewing most products is to make guesses about what they sound like, based on what I hear. True, it's not a very solid assumption, but it's all any reviewer has, or can have, to go on. So, like most of Stereophile's reviewers, I tend to take certain things for granted-such as the unquestionable perfection of the signal my preamp and its signal sources are feeding to the power amp. As you can see, this line of reasoning will get us nowhere. If the speakers too are perfect-even more unlikely-then the resulting sound should be just like that of the signal source, which depends on the degree of perfection of everything else in the recording and reproducing chain. David Hafler used to contend that the ideal amplifier should not "sound like" anything, and I concur, but the truth is that even a "perfect" amplifier will sound like the loudspeakers it is driving. At idle, power consumption is only 250W, which means it could be left on all the time without putting too much of a crimp in your electric bill, and that's what I recommend doing.Īs I explained at tedious length in a rabble-rousing " As We See It" several years ago (Vol.11 No.10, October 1988), there is really no way of knowing for sure what a loudspeaker or an amplifier sounds like, because you cannot listen to one without the other.
Boulder 500ae full#
The supplied specs rate the amp's current drain at 1200W, but this is misleading it only draws that much at full power output. After that, things improve more slowly, but continue to improve for another five hours or so. Half an hour later, it starts to sound like something worthy of a review in these pages. It starts to show promise after 30 minutes, but is still nothing to do cartwheels over. To me, the amplifier sounds veiled, edgy, and flat on turn-on. My first clue was when Boulder prez Jeff Nelson assured me that the 500AE requires no warmup prior to listening. The fact that both amps worked flawlessly right out of the box and have continued to work for several months was my second clue that they might not be what most of us think of as "high-end" audio products. I borrowed two 500AEs for my review, which allowed me to audition one amp in straight stereo or both in strapped mono.
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