When I reviewed Technics’s SU-R1000 integrated amplifier for the December 2021 issue, I found its performance beyond my expectations. It practically rewrote the ritual of listening to music on my home hi-fi. With its wealth of technological advancements, significant user options, and clear, three-dimensional sound, it cast a large sonic shadow over the other integrated amplifiers in my possession.
What’s more, joined to my reference system, the SU-R1000 upended my preconceived notions of what switching amplification sounds like and enlightened me about the sonic possibilities of those other innovations: Technics’s superspeedy GaN FET switching transistors; JENO Engine jitter reduction; ADCT (Active Distortion Cancelling Technology);1 Intelligent Phono EQ; LAPC (Load Adaptive Phase Calibration);2 and the SU-R1000’s practice of digitizing every signal that entered and departed its steel-encased frame. And then there was the SU-R1000’s low noisefloor, credited to its Advanced Speed Silent Power Supply,3 which undoubtedly was at least partly responsible for the Reference Technics amplifier’s surprising resolution.
I wasn’t alone in my praise for the SU-R1000. Technical Editor John Atkinson found some things to crow about when measuring the amp, concluding, “As with the Technics SU-R1000’s line-level analog inputs, this amplifier’s digital and phono inputs offered excellent measured performance.”
I mentioned class-D, but Technics maintains that the SU-R1000 isn’t a class-D amp. Most other class-D amplifier manufacturers claim, with justification,4 that class-D isn’t digital; Technics says their approach to amplification is digital but isn’t class-D. Whatever—I don’t care. What I do care about is that it made me feel more at one with my beloved music collection and made listening to everything from FKA Twigs to the Beatles, from Marc Cary to the Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir, pure joy.
