Copland really needs to have a quiet word with Danish customs authorities. My review sample, which was air-freighted to me almost direct from Denmark, had been opened and resealed by them before being loaded onto the plane. “Based on X-ray control our security personnel (…) had to open the consignment and make a manual control” said the printed note that had been left inside the carton.
I suspect the manual inspection might have been required because unlike many manufacturers of valve amplifiers, which ship their amplifiers with the valves already installed, Copland ships the four KT150 power valves in a separate box inside the main carton. I guess that all those wires and metal supports inside the valves must look extremely suspicious on an X-ray.
EQUIPMENT
The Copland CTA408’s front panel looks so plain that you could almost be forgiven for thinking it was a power amplifier, especially if it’s in its standby mode, in which mode the centrally located front panel display is just a solid black circle save for a single bright blue LED.
Press the small black round-topped push-button to the right of the display, however, and (assuming you’ve connected the power and correctly set the 240V mains rocker switch on the rear panel) the display will light up to show that you have a choice of four line inputs (identified only by the numerals 1 to 4) and a phono input (identified by a capital P). There are two extra symbols in the display, circles with dots in their centre, which appear to have no purpose at all, and which are unexplained by the sparse (eight page) Copland ‘User Guide’. Copland seems to be using a new display on the CTA408, because whereas the older display had the letters ‘SB’ alongside the blue standby LED, and ‘ON’ alongside the red ‘On’ LED, the display on my review sample of the CTA408 had no lettering alongside these LEDs at all.
The small black round-topped pushbutton to the left of the display is a ‘Tape Monitor’ button, which is a description that’s sure to mystify anyone born in the last twenty years or so. And although it might seem that tape machines are making a bit of a comeback, given the number of audiophile sites selling pre-recorded open reel tapes, only two companies in the world currently manufacture open-reel recorders – STM (formerly Mechlabor) and Metaxas & Sins, so ‘comeback’ is hardly an accurate description.
Copland’s volume control is a little intimidating, because it’s calibrated from 0 to infinity in dB, though it’s difficult to decipher this because the ‘dB’ is actually upside down at the two
