INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER PEACHTREE nova 300
The Peachtree Audio aesthetic has become iconic since the company carved out a niche right at the birth of what became known as ‘computer audio’ — an amplifier with a digital-to-analogue converter inside, able to extract maximum fidelity from computer music files. Its original Decco had a claim as the world’s first integrated amplifier with a USB input, while Peachtree amplifiers were also usefully compact, and had a further identifier in including a visible valve stage, supposedly to “smooth over rough recordings”, while delivering an attractive glow visible through a cut-out in the front panel.
More successful amplifiers, DACs, music systems and even speakers followed, and Peachtree recently entered what it calls ‘Peachtree 2.0’, marking its 10th year with a rebooting of both production and philosophy — a new engineering team, a welcome emphasis on selling Peachtree through bricks-and-mortar hi-fi dealers rather than online, and perhaps most remarkably, bringing the building of its products out of China — to Canada (electronics assembly and testing) and North Carolina, USA (final assembly and testing). At the same time it introduced a
