A Minor Journey dot com.

I think I’ve already commented how nice it is to have Kate at home on a Sunday morning. For the past month or more she’s been working seven days a week. It’s left her and I both emotionally and physically drained. I tend to relax when she’s home. It’s nice that way.

This morning I asked her to make me a coffee, and in her wonderful nature she did just that, making a fantastic faux caramel macciato. She rules. . I am one very lucky person.

So, onto the real reason for this post. I’m an advocate of freecycle, a community based organisation with communities worldwide which help recycle unwanted things. It is in effect a re-homing service for everything and anything except animals and things with dodgy copyright. I’ve passed numerous computers and monitors on to grateful new owners for free in the past and I’ve also helped home stuff that other people don’t want. One such thing is my Sony MDS-JB930 Mini Disc separate. Another such item is my old hi-fi amp, a Pioneer SA-610 stereo amp. Despite it’s age it served me rather well for nearly two years after the previous owner had decided to ditch it due to a noisy phono stage. Since I rarely use my decks these days it didn’t really bother me. Sadly though the amp has now become so dirty that I have been unable to either listen to music or use in a lesson environment. Both of which are kind of important, given my background and job. I have been meaning to take it apart now for over six months and clean it but came to the sad realisation that I just don’t have the time right now to do it. So in the spirit of freecycle I’ll pass it onto someone else.

In it’s place I decided to go for the famous Cambridge Audio A5. As always, Cambridge Audio are a great bet if you want a decent no-frills piece of kit at a budget price. I could have gone for the A1 which, at just £69 from RicherSounds is the cheapest of the Cambridge Audio offerings. As I walked in the store I was confronted by a rather sexy and very seductive Azur 840A amp with unbelievable clarity and detail. Sadly, at the other end of the price bracket to the one I was looking at this £799 Cambridge Audio flagship of beauty had to stay just where it was. I made my way to the other end of the shop…

While the A1 has a sound you just can’t beat for the price it does lack some of the frills that most people associate with a hi-fi separate, like a remote control, headphone sockets and multi-speaker set-up. The thing to remember though is that for every frill you loose you gain multitudes on sound clarity, build quality and durability. The A1 was very impressive, but lacked the direct switch I really value when working in a studio set-up. The A5 comes with it, so I decided to pay the extra £50 and go with the A5. A direct switch will bypass the equalisation circuits and simply amplify the signal with no other tweaks. It’s essential if you’re ever going to record or produce and use the amp as a monitor.

Although the A5 also lacks the remote control and headphone sockets it does have the standard single recording loop that comes with almost every amp on the market as well as a pre-amp output. A bit like the direct switch this enables you to output the signal from the amp to a larger and more powerful unit for the amplification.

While I only purchased the A5 on Thursday and have only used it for a total of maybe ten hours since then I can already tell that the amplifier is warming up to be a wonderfully rich beast. In Denali, our house, my teaching studio takes up the smallest of the bedrooms and space is rather limited. As a consequence I’ve got a twelve month old pair of Mordaunt-Short MS302 Bookshelf speakers. The speakers have aged nicely in that time and now they have a very beautiful amp to drive them.

I’ve played a varied collection of music from classical and rock through to pop and hip-hop. Distortion seems to be at a minimum, although with the speakers cranked up at full power there’s a little low-end popping and distortion with big beats and heavily scored orchestral works. Drums sound lively and clear and vocals sweet and well-defined. Obviously, the MS302s help and, as I learnt at the shop, are developed by the same company who make the amp. It all makes for an impressive sound and a good marriage.

If you have a small budget and a small room, but need a grown-up amplifier which will please the ears at volumes from background through to a mild headbanging then I cannot recommend the A5 highly enough. For £120 you end up with an amplifier which will take six inputs, a tape recording loop and allows for bi-wire speakers, great for some of the larger floor-standing kit offered by Mordaunt-Short. Sure, you don’t get a remote control and the standard model doesn’t include a phono pre-amp, but then, if you’re the sort of person to want an A5 I’m guessing you’re going to want your own phono pre-amp anyway….

I shall give it five stars, out of a possible five. Go Cambridge Audio!