T+A MP 3100 HV

At the 2019 AXPONA, I took part in one of my first official meetings, as editor of Stereophile, with members of the manufacturing community: the German company T+A. They were presenting in the room of Texas dealer Lone Star Audio, which was owned by the late Jim Hench. They had a corner hallway to themselves: two rooms and, at the time when I arrived, a hallway table brimming with coffee and pastries. Fortuitous timing.

In one of those rooms I saw some of the company’s lessexpensive gear: I stopped in briefly—yet I spent so much time in their high-end room that I lost track of my coffee cup, setting it down somewhere while freeing up a hand to take some pictures.

It was an impressive room. Attractions included the unusual T+A Solitaire loudspeaker, with its line-source electrostatic tweeters and its array of midrange drivers, and the very architectural M 40 HV monoblock tower, with its heavy tube cages on top.

Yet I was most taken by two big, beefy, silver cases sitting on a component rack. Both were new components from the company’s reference HV series. One was a CD/SACD transport, the PDT 3100 HV; the other was the Reference streaming DAC/Preamp: the SDV 3100 HV. The scale was impressive: the casework, the sheer quantity of aluminum on display, the apparent engineering.

I was also impressed to learn that the DAC/Preamp had a built-in FM tuner. I love FM tuners, even though—perhaps especially because—I can’t use them. More on that later.

The 3100 series includes several other components: a standalone transport (the PDT 3100 HV), a streaming DAC sans preamp (the SD 3100 HV), an integrated amplifier (the PA 3100 HV), and the component under review, the versatile MP 3100 HV SACD player/streaming DAC ($21,000).

A systems approach

T+A is not as well-known in the United States, but in Germany the company is huge. To this American, they appear to fulfill the key German stereotypes: fastidious, with an engineering focus. T+A stands for “Theorie und Anwedungen”—in English, “theory and application.”

Evidence of the company’s engineering focus can be found in the way their product lines are differentiated, less by quality or price point than by functional approach. There are six distinct lines, plus the Caruso: an all-in-one audio system that’s a product line in itself. Series 8, for example, consists of “high-end