INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER
The first true high-end component I owned was an Audio Research SP-10. I reviewed this two-box, tubed preamplifier in the May 1984 issue of the English magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review. “The SP-10 presented [recorded] information in a more coherent, less distorted manner than any preamp I’ve tried,” I wrote in the review, concluding that “the SP-10 made me realize how many good records I owned.” I purchased the SP-10 and brought the preamplifier with me when I moved to the US. Four decades later, I still have that SP-10. “Every now and again, when I want to be reminded of the magic it brings to my music, I set it up, plug in the tubes, and spend an evening spoiling my ears,” I wrote for an article in Ken Kessler’s 2020 book on the history of Audio Research.1
The SP-10 was designed by a team led by William Zane Johnson, who founded Audio Research in Minnesota in 1970. After nearly four decades at the company’s helm, he stepped aside in 2008, becoming chairman emeritus before passing away in 2011.2 But his legacy lives on, with a continuing succession of great-sounding tube preamplifiers and amplifiers. Several engineers contribute to the designs, but a consistent presence is Warren Gehl, Audio Research’s long-term setup person and “Aural Evaluator,” the “guardrail that keeps the company on the straight and narrow sonically,” I was told by Dave Gordon, Audio Research’s long-term keeper of the brand’s institutional memory.
I was planning to review the latest
