Ayre Acoustics EX-8 2.0
INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER
In New York City, everything comes at a premium: Housing, groceries, transportation, walking space, living space, sanity space—consider our cubbyhole apartments and tenement buildings. Even “air rights” are for sale in NYC, including rights to the air over my beloved Katz’s Delicatessen in the Lower East Side.1 The square footage of my downtown apartment is less than a quarter of the space of my North Carolina home. (Brownstones? Only above 72nd Street.2) But, as the song says, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” What did Frank Sinatra know, anyway? He was from Hoboken!
The Ayre EX-8 2.0 is one sweet honey of an integrated amplifier, “sweet” being the operative word.
In places like this—indeed anywhere there’s a reason to keep things compact—there’s an argument to be made for an all-in-one music source. Today’s integrateds often include independent preamp and power amp sections, a phono stage, a D/A converter, streaming capability, a headphone output, and apparently the ability to simultaneously fry an egg and book a flight to High End Munich 2021, if only it weren’t cancelled.
I’m lucky to have three integrated amplifiers in-house: the Heed Audio Elixir, the Parasound Hint 6 Halo, the Schiit Audio Ragnarok 2, and the component under review, the Ayre Acoustics EX-8 2.0 Integrated Hub ($8350).
In his January 2019 review of the original Ayre EX-8, Ste
reophile Technical Editor John Atkinson wrote, “I used Ayre’s EX-8 for almost all my serious listening from the summer through the early winter of 2018, and in all that time I only rarely felt I was missing something sound-quality-wise. … The EX-8 Integrated Hub is a high-end contender at a competitive price.” With its substantially updated design, the EX-8 2.0 should be even better. So, is it?
Design
Since JA1’s review, Ayre Acoustics’ Ariel
