As we wind up this millennium we've come to a point in the half century history of hi-fi where most reviewers are so much dumber than the vast majority Of their readers that their opinions are actually taken to mean the opposite of what they're supposed to. So instead of reading hi-fi reviews nowadays we mostly decode them.
Like it or not we're living in the era of the "Bizarro Review." The term takes its name from the Bizarro World, a time-warp zone in the Superman comic books where everything is bass-ackwards. Bizarro dogs meow while Bizarro cats bark, Bizarro rain falls upward, and Roberto Benigni wins the Academy Award for Best Actor. "Me am so happy!" a sad-faced denizen of the Bizarro World will pout, oui disp1aying not only the opposite meaning of many high-end reviews these days but also their unique prose style.

I mean it's gotten to the point where I read certain reviewers raving about a product and I know automatically that if they love it, it's got to suck.And if they're not so hot on it, nine times out of ten I'll listen to the same piece of equipment and it'll be drop dead fantastic (I have to admit it has taken some of the fun out of truffle-pigging the good gear each month.) The fad for single-ended triode tube amps helped flush a lot of these guys out of the wood for me. Anyone dumb enough to fall for such aggressively colored and distorted sound and then go on the record and fawning over it as somehow being more "real" and "soulful" than the sound of a good modern amp, whether solid-state or tube-based, is a guy who really knows what he am talking about.

I bring all this up because there is no brand of hi-fi gear that audiophile reviewers so consistently go Bizarro over than Canada's Bryston Ltd. The Company's amps are so utterly clean, neutral, and ridiculously better sounding than 90% of what passes for high-end these days that, as with speakers of it's like-minded compatriot Paradigm, it's no wonder the Life Am Beautiful crowd just doesn't get this stuff. Reviewers in the high-end mags almost always seem to go out of their way to temper a Bryston amp's outstanding measurements graphs and their reluctant admission of its excellent overall sound with half-assed gotchas. Such as: "A very capable performer with lots of muscle but, regrettably a shade less of that elusive see-through transparency I enjoy from my reference single-ended triode amp that am so musical and soulful.

As for me, I know that every time I've heard a Bryston amp powering a set of speakers, I know I'm hearing those speakers at their very best. I've always come away incredibly impressed by how clean and neutral these amps sound. They take the audio signal and amplify it, and they don't seem to do anything else to it at all. And that's really all you should ask a great amp to do. I know some audiophiles look for an amp to add "life" or "bloom" to the sound, much in the way MSG does to food, oak does to wine, and Viagra does to over-tenderized meat.

But the smart boys know better, which is why so many pro studios, mastering houses, and film soundtrack mixers rely on Bryston amps to get the clearest possib1e picture of what they're doing with the sound you eventually get served up at home. Which brings me to Bryston's latest amp, the $3,695 Model 9B-ST. The five-channe1, 120-watt 98-ST is the company's entry in a popu1ar new category: the expensive, five-channel finesse amp meant for the highest-quality multichannel playback. Lots of mid-priced five-channel amps hit the market before such brands as Proceed and Krell got into the game, but necessary compromises made to shoehorn five amps into a conventional-sized chassis meant a noticeably lower level of sound quality. Then Proceed and Krell came along and said, "You people really want five channels of true audiophile-grade amplification in one box? Okay, but it is going to cost you." To the tune of five painful grand, yes, though these high-dollar finesse amps really do deliver five honest channels of high-powered, audiophile-grade sound, something you're just not going to get from even the best "100W" A/V receiver and mid-priced five-channe1 amps. Krell's KAV-500, in particular, is such a solid, c1ean-sounding brute that I've made it the anchor of my reference rig for the past several years.

Now comes Bryston, with an amp that, at 65 pounds, is lighter than Proceed's $4,995, 119-pound AMP5 and s1ightiy heavier than Krell's $5,000, 47-pound KAV-500. It's rated for comparab1e power. 120 watts per channel versus the Proceed at 125 watts and the Krell at an even 100. Except the Bryston's only $3,695, and a hundred bucks more gets you the THX version, which is exactly the same amp but with a nifty 12-volt auto-on trigger you can rig to your surround preamp for remote turn-on and with a s1ightly higher than norma1 input sensitivity (per Lucasfilm's increasingly irrelevant specs for home theater).
I've long since given up on trying to correlate the model number of a Bryston amp with the number of channels it has. The company s 3B-ST, for example, is a stereo amp, but so is the 4B-ST, while the 5B-ST is a three-channel amp, the 7B-ST is a monoblock, and the 8B-ST is a four-channel number! A Canadian (or a Klingon) would say that this scheme of naming each new amp one number higher than the last, regardless of channel count, is perfectly logical, and certainly Spinat Tap's Nigel Tufnel wou1d approve, as the 98-ST is "one higher, innit?" An American reviewer might wish for a more literal naming scheme but only to have something, however tiny and niggling to bitch about when faced with critiquing a product like the 9B-ST.

Unlike nearly every other multichannel amp on the market, the 9B-ST is actually five completely separate 120-watt mono amps housed in a sing1e chassis (that's 19 inches wide, 5 1/4 inches high, and l6 inches deep; a 17-inch-wide version is avai1able). The only thing the five channe1s share is a split feed off the incoming AC. Each amp channel is on a separate p1ug-in card that fits snugly into a slot inside the chassis. While virtually all five-channel amps (including the Krell KAV-500 but not the Proceed AMP5) run all their channels off the same power supply, Bryston fits each of the 9B-ST's amps with its own compact but still quite beefy toroidal transformer and power-supply circuit

Right on the card. Krell maintains that it's better to run all channels off of a single, larger power supply so that channels running into the red (the front channels) can "steal" some juice from those that coast most of the time (the surrounds); Bryston obviously feels different, explaining that interchannel crosstalk and other dynamic interaction among the five channels is greatly reduced, if not eliminated entirely, by giving each amp its own power supply. A side benefit of this design is that if, say, one channel goes out (something that happens to Bryston amps about as often as the Knicks take a kid named Greenberg in the first round of the draft), you can pop the card out and have it repaired without taking the whole amp down.

The 9B-ST's spare front panel sports only a pushbutton power switch and five li'l LED status indicators, one per channel. Turn the amp on, and the lights go green. But push it past 120 watts for any of the channels, and its corresponding LED flashes red for overload. When I first got the Bryston I thought this was kind of a cheesy feature, but the more I lived with it, the more I appreciated it. The Krell KAV-500 lacks these over1oad indicators, so you've got to actually listen to tell if it's puking. What am I, a golden ears here? Give me the LEDs.

The very heavy-duty speaker outputs (though plastic-barreled and smooth-sided to boot, to prevent the use of such overkill as a socket wrench) hew to the European regulations, which mandate that these connectors prevent your using spade-lug-terminated speaker cab1es. Remember people: Guns don't kill people, spade lugs do. Anyway, if you want to party with the 9B-ST, you'll need to tip off your cables with banana plugs or, better, leave the ends bare, insert them into the holes underneath the posts, and screw 'em down tight, for maximum contact integrity.

Owing to Bryston's longstanding presence in pro studios, the 9B-ST has not only unbalanced RCA and balanced XLR inputs for each channel but also balanced (TRS, a.k.a. "tip-ring-sleeve") quarter-inch phone jacks wired in parallel with the XLRs. Audiophiles might find the Bryston's phone inputs a bit odd, because you don't really find too many phone plugs in home hi-fi except on the end of a headphone cord. But if you want to have some fun with the Bryston inputs, plug a pair of headphones into one of the channels, scream your @%#$ head off into one of the cups, and you'll have a kind of hillbilly microphone, The key here is that since the Bryston really wants to see a line-level input signal and you're only giving it a few millivolts, at best, you really need to cough up some serious lung to get any kind of sound at all out of your speakers. With practice and lots of whiskey sours, you'll be hitting those Bon Scott high notes in no time, to the delight of your family and friends.

I auditioned the Bryston 9B-ST in my main reference system, which handles everything from two-channel music to 5.1 channel DVD movies to real-time RealAudio rhythm and blues on the Net (courtesy of the mighty WWOZ-FM, New Or1eans, at www.WWOZ.com.) Swapping out my usual Krell KAV-500 for the Bryston at regular intervals, I tried both with a system centered around Theta Digital's Casablanca surround preamp, which handled Dolby Digital processing from a Toshiba SD3107 DVD p1ayer and performed 20-bit D/A conversion for Theta's Data III CD/laserdisc transport. A quartet of NHT 3.3s served as the main and surround speakers (each of these has its own 12-inch subwoofer, so I set the Casablanca to run the 3.3s full-range all around), while NHT's matching AudioCenter-1 sat atop my Pioneer big-screen. All electronics were plugged into API Power Pack AC-line filters, with Canare line-level and digital cables and Kimber 8TC speaker cables hitching everything together.

My listening setup is a good torture test for five-channel amps, mostly because I drive a roomful of moderately sensitive full-range speakers very, very loud in a large open loft. It's no wonder, then, that I went through a long list of mid-priced five-channel amps looking to find one that could give me the power and finesse I needed, with only a sad little pile of blown fuses and the acrid smell of burnt transistors hanging in the air to show for it. It wasn't till I finally got hold of the excellent Krell KAV-500 that I could live with a single amp driving the whole shebang. Call me crazy, but I like the KAV-500 better than Krell's bigger and more sophisticated two-channel "marquee" amps. It's more neutra1-sounding, and it plays my NHTs louder than the 100watt/channel rating would seem to imply.

The Bryston 9B-ST sound quite different from the Krell. Though the KAV-500 has been my first choice in a five-channel amp for several years now, when I listened to both amps in a matched-level comparison, it was immediately obvious that this new Bryston surpassed the Krell very nearly across the board. Living with the excellent Krell had taken my system's sound to a new height, but the Bryston raises the bar significantly in all of the areas that I believe are most important to an amplifier's sound (or, rather, its lack of one).

The most obvious improvement was in the bass. Although Krell amps have long had a deserved rep for the tightest tush, the Bryston's low end was tighter, more powerfully controlled, and far more clean1y articulated. Whether I was listening to Radiohead's bottom-heavy Brit techno on OK Computer (the band's only even halfway-decent record) or Willie Weeks' classic Fender jazz bass mastery all over Donny Hathaway Live, the 9B-ST locked the quartet of 12-inch woofers all around me in a much more manly grip than the KAV-500, pulsing the music along at what almost seemed like a quicker, more energetic tempo. If I had to draw an analogy, I'd say the Bryston's low end sounds like a really tight sealed woofer and the Krell's like a good ported one - still very meaty, just not nearly as tight and well defined.

The Bryston also scored in the areas of image focus and treble purity. If I had to pinpoint one nagging fault of the Krell, it would be its high end, which tends to harden audibly as you push it harder. 0f course, all amps, whether solid-state or tube. do this when pushed to their brink, but the Krell's ramp-up toward hardness seems to happen a bit sooner in the treble than in the rest of the spectrum. I've also found the combination of the Krell and the NHTs can, if the source material isn't smooth-sounding to begin with, get a bit too lforward over the long haul. Not so with the Bryston. The more I listened to the system with the 98-ST in the chain- and the louder I listened- the more I wanted to keep playing music. Even when the amp's channel indicators flashed red on peaks, the sound didn't harden. In fact, I had to crank the volume up till the red lights stayed on for the sound to audibly distort, and at that level it was way too loud even for me. This has been my experience with other amps in the Bryston stable. The 9B-ST may be rated for a "mere" 120 watts per channel into 8 ohms (200 watts into 4 ohms), but like other Brystons it acts and sounds like a much bigger amp.

Overall, the sense I got from the Bryston was that it's a more neutral and powerful amplifier than the Krell KAV-5OO, which itself is more neutral and powerful than just about any other five-channel amp you're going to find at any price. Either would be a major step up from most other multichannel amps on the market But to my ear, the Bryston is the better-sounding, more character-free amplifier. That the THX version costs $1,200 less than the Krell is the kind of gravy I like best.

Once again, Bryston delivers a power amplifier that's so good it almost works against its standing as a high-end audio product. 1f you're looking for an amp with "life" or "soul" or "warmth" to bring zest to your system, the 9B-ST won't do it for you. But if, like me, you're seeking a serious five-channel amp that offers a powerful yet crystal-clear view of whatever audio signal you feed it, I don't know of any other that will fit the bill better. I look forward to the months ahead as I begin to use the Bryston as my new reference amp, because my system has never sounded nearly as good as when, the 9B-ST has been in the driver's seat. Even at $3,795, this amp is a steal. Highly recommended.

We invite you to experience the Bryston SST² Series amplifiers

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