Start your new system with this tremendous bang for the buck package. Each product is outstanding in its own right and you save a few pennies in this package.

Speakers

Speakers have more to do with your system’s sound than any other product. We recognize that every part of the system is important, but speakers provide the window to your musical world. If you don’t have revealing, powerful speakers, you’ve already lost the battle. We’ll start here.

Axiom M50 Speakers, $1400 Per Pair

Axiom M50s are substantial towers from Canada, while everything else you’ll find in this price class is just Chinese mediocrity. Let’s investigate.

Axiom/Bryston merged some years ago. The resulting entity is simply called Bryston. Bryston and Axiom speakers share a number of things in common. These speakers are made in Canada, by Bryston. Yep, the woofers, midrange drivers and tweeters are all made in house in Canada.

Bryston drivers and cabinets are more heavy duty and come with a 20 year warranty. Axioms are outstanding as well, just not as powerful as Brystons and come with a five year warranty.

All of the drivers Bryston makes have to pass a gauntlet of 8 QC tests. With our example being 6.5” woofers, you could get woofer #1, 1000 or 10,000 and they would be sonically identical. The differences among them are so minute that they can barely be measured- and certainly can’t be heard.

The same holds for midrange drivers and tweeters. QC is core to Bryston’s speaker building.

Having drive elements in your left and right speakers that are for all practical purposes exactly the same, means your speakers sound in focus. Bryston uses contiguous Pure Aluminum for its midrange and woofer drivers. Bryston uses Pure Titanium for its tweeters.

The Chinese typically use sandwiches of materials for woofers and midrange drivers. Since the core material isn’t sturdy enough on its own, it serves as a substrate. Supporting materials like paper, plastic, Kevlar, Rohacell or Graphene are glued to the substrate to make it more sturdy. In mass production the bonding process is uncertain and can invite buzzing. The finished product, a sandwich driver, is like swimming with your boots on. They’re not as quick and responsive compared to what Bryston makes, which is contiguous Pure Aluminum. Again, Bryston doesn’t buy these from a vendor, however well meaning that vendor may be. They make their own drivers in house so they have total control over the QC.

When the finished cabinets are built and loaded, the entire speaker has to graph within a tight window of its reference standard. Then it has to pass a 24 hour torture test which is a roller coaster of abuse with a Bryston 1500w amp, designed specifically for this purpose.

The Chinese alternatives aren’t built like this. Drive elements come off the production line in a massive house and get screwed right into cabinets. The cabinets are boxed and out they go. There can be wide variation in unit to unit samples. As you read magazines like Stereophile and British hi-fi news that actually MEASURE speaker performance, you will see in the fine print that some speakers, Monitor Audio recently, run 3dB or more off balance, left to right, on tweeters alone.

Please don’t be fooled by venerable European or American brand names. Literally every speaker you see out there in this price range is built in China or Malaysia.

When you consider additional differences in midrange and woofer drivers, you can end up with quite the discombobulation in your music system. If you appreciate precise acoustic guitar playing with a terrific singer (Tracy Chapman anyone?) these things matter.

You want the vocal to be true and centered. You want the natural timbre of the guitar or piano to back the singer. With Chinese speakers you often get a bag of cats that don’t play well with each other.

We love music. We crave the immediacy an impressive recording can bring to our listening rooms. I had a recent visitor tell me that after he had lived with Bryston speakers for a couple of months, he felt like Johnny Cash had become “my buddy.” These details make the difference.

Integrated Amplifier

The integrated amp is the motor that drives the resolving Axiom M50s. If you get an integrated with muscle, it can provide impressive rather than wimpy bass. It can provide vocal, piano and guitar work that POP from the speakers instead of sounding mundane, buried deep in the boxes.

Atoll IN50 $1200 (50×2)

The Atoll IN50 is among the best amplifier values in our business. Atoll is made in France, in Atoll’s own house, with a 3 year warranty. Literally every competitor near this price range is a pile of chips slapped together in a Chinese job house.

Atoll is made with TLC. They start by making their own boards. These boards use through hole, rather than surface mount parts. Atoll populates its boards in house. The component parts have “legs” that go through the PCB. They’re clipped and ultimately soldered. Surface mount parts don’t have the same connection, reliability, serviceability or sound quality.

The 170VA toroidal transformer is a generous, robust heart for the amplifier. Atoll has its transformers made to its specs in Spain.

You will have a hard time even finding the transformer in a Chinese amp for a grand.

The only running wire in IN50 links the transformer to the board. Check out the Chinese. Under the hood is a spaghetti mess of wires and ribbons, all of which promulgate RFI and steal precision from your music.

Atoll uses just under 20,000uF of filter capacitance to help constitute this sturdy power supply and deliver audacious sound quality. Atoll designs its own filter caps and has them built to order by Nipon in Japan, not China. You’d be lucky to get half this allotment of power supply caps from China.

Atoll uses MATCHED MOSFET output transistors. Atoll takes the time and expense to hand match its output devices so the ones in your amp will be imperceptibly different from one another. This insures smooth sound. Mismatched output transistors spew distortion artifacts which wield a harsh, fatiguing sound. The Chinese invariably run Class D modules with are reliable, but sound thin in the bass with subdued groove.

Atoll employs a precision tracking ALPS motorized volume control. It tracks precisely and smoothly. You can FEEL IN50’s muscle as you use it- compared to any of its Chinese alternatives which are as flimsy as they sound.

IN50 comes in line stage form at this price range. You can add a phono board ($130) or DAC ($300) if you care to. Atoll alloys YOU to decide what you need and want to pay for.

IN50 has 5 RCA inputs and also uses TWO sets of preamp outputs! (It even has a HT bypass option but I’m not a fan of that feature.) This, makes IN50 a flexible hub for your system. You can run IN50 by its lonesome, or add a subwoofer or two. You could ADDITIONALLY add a power amp to muscle up IN50’s beefcake quotient if you feel the need.

The Combo

This is a fabulous duo, like Astaire and Rodgers. The speakers are uniquely revealing, dynamic and powerful for their price point. This, is an extremely well balanced system that forms a synergy for your music system. All you need to add is your source.

My favorite source is playing CDs. Atoll makes the best CD players at affordable price points. If you front the IN50 with an Atoll CD player you’ll be shocked at what was hiding on your silver discs.

Most people make the mistake of running an insubstantial CD player, or maybe even use a DVD or Blu-ray player for music. Running these two pound players is like using a Crosley turntable from Barnes & Noble. They sound lean and harsh. Please give your CDs a fighting chance by running them with an Atoll CD50 or MD100. You need to hear your CD library at its best!

Perhaps you want to stream, or play records. You can run a streamer (Bluesound Node $550) or turntable into IN50 easily.

While I don’t think Axiom M50s need a powered subwoofer to make them sound rich, IN50 has the connections to add one or two powered subs as well. If you love bass and want to quake the house, IN50 is ready to rock.