Expensive but worth it
What do you get for all that money? The answer is carefully developed, beautifully built yet understated products that shoot for the stars and get way closer than most.
The Mimesis 37S NextGen preamplifier is the brains of this pairing. It comes in two chunky boxes; one houses the sensitive audio circuits while the other is home to the hefty power supply. This divide-to-conquer approach is sensible given that power supplies have high current flow and can generate unwanted magnetic fields and plenty of vibration. Such things will tend to spoil all aspects of the unit’s sonic performance if left unchecked.
This Goldmund preamp is a focused design aiming for the ultimate in performance, so the feature count is limited. Such features as headphone connectivity or a phono stage, even when implemented with care, can easily adversely affect absolute sound quality, so justifying their exclusion.
Take the preamp’s lid off and you will find an immaculately constructed unit. The audio circuits are laid out in a neat dual-mono arrangement where any interaction between the channels is minimised. Goldmund’s amplifier design ethos has long centred around high bandwidth circuits with special attention paid to minimising group delays and time distortion. These priorities remain intact here.
There is a good choice of inputs – five single-ended and two balanced XLR – so this amplifier shouldn’t be caught short in even the most complex of stereo systems.
Look past its understated appearance and you will find that the Telos 300 power amplifier is a beast. It has enough poke to drive pretty much any speaker on the market to high volume levels. So, unless you have a listening space the size of an aircraft hangar, we suspect the claimed power output of 225 watts per channel into 8 ohms should be fine.
We are pleased with just how relatively unostentatious these products are. Most rivals go all out to impress with extravagant cosmetics and plenty of bling. After all, we are talking about huge price tags, and quite a lot of customers will want something to show off to their friends. That isn’t what these products are about. Everything from the immaculately laid-out circuit boards and superbly made casework to the simple metal remote handset speaks of high-quality, unpretentious engineering.
EXPRESSIVE PERFORMER
This Goldmund pairing doesn’t have a strong sonic signature (which is good) and simply lets the character of the partnering equipment shine through. The amplifiers
