RATING
NOW HEADQUARTERED IN London, English audio gear manufacturer Cambridge Audio was founded in 1968 in the university city of the same name. The company’s initial offering was the walnut-trimmed 20 watts-per-channel (Wpc) P40 integrated amplifier. (Notably, the P40 was the first consumer audio amp to contain a toroidal transformer, a now de rigueur feature in high-end audio.)
In the fifty-plus years since the P40’s introduction, Cambridge Audio has developed numerous advanced technologies, many of them proprietary ones. These include Crossover Displacement (XD) amplification, which is said to combine the performance of class-A operation with the efficiency of class-B; Adaptive Time Filtering (ATF), which upsamples most digital signals to 24-bit/384kHz resolution; and Balanced Mode Radiator speaker drivers, which use a single flat-panel transducer, thus eliminating the need for a dedicated tweeter.
Cambridge’s Audio’s latest offering is the Evo 150 “All in One Player” (for our purposes, we’ll call it a streaming integrated amplifier), which contains an on-board amplifier, wired/wireless music streamer, headphone amp, and phono stage. Sporting walnut side chassis panels, the 150 derives its aesthetic inspiration from, you guessed it, the original P40 integrated amp. Though at
