MUSICAL FIDELITY M8XI

Do you know what would improve Musical Fidelity’s new M8xi integrated amplifier immediately? Feet. Four of them. Four big large feet. Oh, and handles. Four of them too. But I’ll get to grips with those issues a bit later in this review. Probably the important thing I can say about this new M8xi is that unlike many famous companies that have been sold whose new owners have subsequently, let us say, “dropped the ball”, Musical Fidelity’s new owner, Heinz Lichtenegger, has instead moved the company to the top of the Hi-Fi league table.

Not only has Lichtenegger retained the services of long-time Musical Fidelity designer Simon Quarry, he has also decided that rather than shifting the production of Musical Fidelity’s components to one of his own factories in the Czech Republic or Slovakia, where he builds his Pro-Ject turntables and electronics, he’ll instead keep building Musical Fidelity components in the same high-tech factory that’s been building them for the past 30 years or so. Lichtenegger and Quarry have also obviously decided to put power output front and centre again at Musical Fidelity, because the M8xi’s power output, at 550-watts per channel into 8Ω, makes it not only the most powerful integrated amplifier in Musical Fidelity’s current extensive lineup, but also the most powerful integrated amplifier Musical Fidelity has ever built.

THE EQUIPMENT

There’s very little on the front panel of the M8xi to suggest that it’s a very full-featured integrated amplifier, with multiple analogue and digital inputs. Indeed there’s very little on the front panel at all, as you can plainly see for yourself!

The front panel’s control and display layout would would certainly have found favour with famous English poet William Blake because, like his poem ‘The Tyger’, it’s wonderfully symmetrical, indeed almost perfectly so. The perfectionist in me says that had I been responsible for the design, I would most certainly have shifted the word ‘Display’ to the right of the button below the volume control, and made the ‘Musical Fidelity’ logo at the top right of the front panel more visually resemble the model name at the top left. But that’s just me.

As for the operation of this control, pushing it repeatedly will cycle the brightness of the front panel’s display through its three available levels, and along the way give you the option of switching the display offentirely. If you choose to have the display off, you’ll find that if you adjust either the volume control above it, or the input source selector at left, the display will