Ayre Acoustics EX-8 2.0 Integrated Hub D/A integrated amplifier
10 November 2021
In New York City, everything comes at a premium: Housing, groceries, transportation, walking space, living space, sanity space—consider our cubbyhole apartments and tenement buildings. Even “air rights” are for sale in NYC, including rights to the air over my beloved Katz’s Delicatessen in the Lower East Side (footnote 1). The square footage of my downtown apartment is less than a quarter of the space of my North Carolina home. (Brownstones? Only above 72nd Street, footnote 2.) But, as the song says, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” What did Frank Sinatra know, anyway? He was from Hoboken!
In places like this—indeed anywhere there’s a reason to keep things compact—there’s an argument to be made for an all-in-one music source. Today’s integrateds often include independent preamp and power amp sections, a phono stage, a D/A converter, streaming capability, a headphone output, and apparently the ability to simultaneously fry an egg and book a flight to High End Munich 2021, if only it weren’t cancelled.