Aesthetix Audio Mimas

I love listening to new audio products and discovering how they make me feel. I do my best to open my mind, ears, and pores, to trust the process and see where it leads me. Ultimately, for all the words and analogies I or any reviewer may conjure up, what we do isn’t very different from a dog sniffing out a new patch of grass or an insect sending out its antennae to determine what’s what. In all cases, the spirit and care with which we approach new territory helps inform our conclusions.

So it was with eager anticipation that I approached the Mimas integrated amplifier, the latest product from Aesthetix Audio, a seven-person company based in southern California and founded in 1994 by designer Jim White.

White claims that the hybrid Mimas’s solid-state power and tubed preamp sections combine the functionality of his Atlas power amplifier ($8000) and Calypso line stage ($5000) in a single, 44-lb package costing $7000 in its basic configuration. The name of this and other Aesthetix models sprang from a Monopoly-like game called Solar Quest that White’s family used to play. The game involves flying around our solar system on each planet’s moons. White had memorized the names of those moons—Atlas, Calypso, and Mimas all orbit Saturn—and thought they’d make great product names. He spoke to me about the Mimas by phone.

“Our goal with the Mimas was to not sacrifice our core values whatsoever as we brought the technologies that are in our more expensive separates into an integrated,” White told me. “The power section is a zero-feedback, DCcoupled, balanced, bridged design. We retained the volume control from the Calypso line stage and the whole gain-stage structure. The output stage