Power to please

Our last visiting amplifier from Cambridge Audio left a permanent impression: the company’s ‘Edge’ pre- and power combination, which was created to mark the company’s half-century by releasing its highest level of product in decades. The power amplifier in particular proved a slam-dunk favourite, so effusively and effortlessly did music simply gush forth from its speaker outputs.

So we welcomed the CXA81, the integrated amplifier from the second of Cambridge’s four ranges of separates, above the recent entry-level AX range, below the 851 series, and looking very much the classic yet modern hi-fi separates amplifier. At this price it’s all about balancing the right features with the best possible amplification, and since Cambridge has been succeeding in that regard for so long (and remains, unlike so many early hi-fi houses, a UK-based company), we had grounds for initial optimism.

Equipment

The two amplifiers in the current CX Series 2 range are an evolution of the original CX models released back in 2014, when this amplifier’s predecessor, the CXA80, won itself a Sound+Image Award in its price category as Amplifier of the Year. So on the whole we were perfectly happy to hear that for the new model, Cambridge hasn’t messed with the fundamental circuit design of the amplifier, but has rather focused on “the desire to progress… doing everything we can to make it ‘more’… more refined, more precise, more engrossing… more musical.”

So while the fundamentals remain the same, Cambridge’s engineers have gone right through the circuit tweaking at the component level, notably upgrading most of the op-amps in the signal path, and the capacitors in both the pre and power sections of the amp. Notably they have not switched to some new-fangled Class-D amplifier. Here you get 80W of