Most of the test work for this review used the excellent Triangle Quartet floorstanding loudspeaker and a Denon DCD-SA1 SACD player, which turned out to be completely compatible with the character of the amplifier. The heatsink, for example, is shaped to nestle snugly around the large torroidal transformer, while the volume has a long control rod, so that altering the volume using the front panel adjusts the volume at the input, avoiding transporting the audio signal from the back of the amplifier to the front, and back again. Under the hood, the Nuovo reveals itself as being unusually well made. In the grander scheme of things, this is no big deal, and it's certainly no deal-breaker, but it could have been done better. More to the point, the buttons are small and stiff and on the verge of being unyielding.
Impressively the carcass is hewn from a lump of wood, though the main control matrix is secured to the unit with two ugly crosshead screws. It's perfectly functional, however, and has the benefit of being a full-system remote, with enough buttons to operate one of the matching Unison Research CD players. The only feature we weren't completely happy with is the supplied RC2 remote control. The aluminium casework is solidly built and includes well-considered mechanical earthing, which eliminates microphony. The fascia is a pleasing aluminium extrusion, with a non-reflective sandcast finish matching the controls and the mains power switch is situated on the right hand side – accessible, but not immediately obvious. The back panel has similar restraint, as already described. There are only two controls, volume and an input selector, each associated with a discreet LED which will warn you when the unit is powering-up, if the protection has been triggered, or if it is running. There are the same elegant, simple lines, the same honed-down quality – there is nothing here that isn't required – and the same absolute focus on the fundamentals, with one minor exception. This may not be standard practice in the high-fidelity realm, but it opens up the possibility of using relatively small, very high-quality, narrow bandwidth speakers, with one or even two subwoofers to broaden the reproduced bandwidth.įrom the outside, there is more than a hint of Copland-style aesthetics here. One intriguing departure from normality is, that in addition to the usual speaker output, there is a line output that tracks the volume control (unlike a standard tape output for example), which can be used to drive a subwoofer.
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