What a coincidence that all the products of this system happen to to have the 80 designation. When you put these individual products together to form “System 80” a true synergy occurs. Each product shines through when linked with ideal price/performance stable mates!

Axiom M80 Speakers, $2300 Per Pair

{39.5h, 9.25w, 17d, 94dB SPL, 4 ohms}

Axiom’s new M80 is Bryston’s “workingman’s version” of its venerable A2. M80 is a mid sized tower that can deliver bass and power you wouldn’t dream possible by its size. Why’s that?

Virtually every other mid sized tower for just over a couple of grand is a chintzy box from China. They have flimsy cabinets, drivers and can’t deliver the important bass WEIGHT that is fundamentally important to almost all music.

Bryston’s QC ensures you’ll get glasses with a precise prescription instead of a hodge-podge of parts out of bin. Make no mistake, the Chinese are doing piece work, regardless of the name on the box.

M80 is a legit 3-way and employs DOUBLES of drivers to give you a tall, broad and powerful musical experience. By running doubles of drivers, each needs HALF the excursion compared to running a single driver. Axiom attains outstanding definition with this configuration. You have the added advantage of the driver array presenting a tall and wide image.

All the Axiom drivers are made of a contiguous Pure Aluminum. The Chinese are big on drivers made of plastic, paper or sandwiches of this glued to that. Pure Aluminum acts as a Linear Piston without flex and delivers a cleaner, stronger performance.

Bryston/Axiom voices their speakers to sound Steinway Smooth. They don’t sound bright or thin- clearly hallmarks of the Chinese imports. The imports typically try to grab your attention and are voiced like TVs with the vivid setting cranked up. They’ll wear you out. The Brystons are smooth and more realistic on acoustic instruments, and most importantly, human voices.

Atoll IN80 Integrated Amp, $1700 (80×2)

IN80, like all Atoll amps, uses a dual mono power supply. To hit this price point IN80 runs a single 340 VA low loss transformer with separate windings for each channel. Atoll designed this transformer. It’s built for them in Spain to spec. Atoll’s design includes damping resin to usurp unwanted transformer buzzing. The other guys just use the cheapest transformers they can, buzzing away, while they’re being built in a job house in China. If you check out photos of what’s in the Chinese gear, sometimes the transformers are so small, you can’t even be sure of what they are.

IN80 uses a precision tracking ALPS volume control. It’s clean, smooth and has a nice heavy feel to it. Mostly, it’s been selected for its precise channel to channel tracing ability.

IN80 uses power supply caps that they have custom made in Japan. IN80 runs 31,474uF of filter capacitance to provide a stiff, muscular sound. If you look inside Atoll’s competitors you’ll typically see 10,000uF or less. Atoll’s powerful build is unique to the price point.

IN80 runs MATCHED MOSFET output transistors. The matching of transistors insures Atoll will have a warm, rather than grainy sound. Nobody else is going to this effort at anywhere near this price range. Atoll runs their amps in an AB configuration, operating about 15% class A. This is a welcome alternative to all the frail D amps out there.

Atoll circuit boards are a work of art. The board is cleanly laid out with no rat’s nest of spaghetti. Check out the other guys and you’ll see wire running over, under and around a plethora of electronic components where they’re guaranteed to pick up hiss and hum. Atoll is dead quiet in background noise.

IN80 has two sets of preamp outs! You have tremendous flexibility going forward. You can add a powered sub, or two, and maybe a larger power amp some day.

When you realize how Atoll is built, you can begin to infer why 80 watts of Atoll sounds much richer and stronger than double that from a Chinese amp with tiny power supply. Atoll’s creations are classic, instead of trickery.

IN80 is priced in line stage config. You can add MM phono for $130. You can add a marvelous DAC for $300. Build your own pizza.

CD80 Compact Disc Player, $1750

I want a great CD player in my system for numerous reasons. The most obvious is, yep, I want to play my thousands of CDs without clicks, pops, hiss or dealing with the hassle of everything that goes with a needle in the groove.

CDs sound better than streaming the same music. And seriously, how lazy are you if you can’t get up roughly once an hour to change a CD? Please don’t tell me your wife won’t let you have CDs around the house. I’ve heard that one… holy cow.

I just read a review in Stereophile where the veteran writer, a true vinyl hound, insists his records don’t sound their best unless he washes each LP with TWO machines. First, he washes them with the $3280 Degritter machine. It takes over 8 minutes. But he’s not happy with some resulting residue. So he needs to run that same LP through his $1800 VPI machine a few minutes more. That’s right, this experienced reviewer insists you need about $5k of machines and at 15 minutes of time for PER RECORD for it to perform well.

Ummm, no thanks.

This is a magnificent time to be a CD shopper. The plethora of box set bargains in particular is a never ending treasure of music at great pricing. In the past few years I’ve bought fabulous boxes from Kissin, Argerich, Freire, Uchida, Lupu, Pollini and more.

Most of our customers have run cheap, lightweight Chinese CD players into nice systems over the years. If you run a featherweight CD player into a great integrated amp like Atoll, you’ve created an out of sync bar graph. Your CD player is a 1 and the amp is a 10.

The same would be true if you ran a rickety plastic turntable into an otherwise strong system. Because turntables are so mechanical, we recognize and accept that chintzy mechanics can’t perform well. In general, customers don’t appreciate that it’s the same story with CD players. But it is.

CD80 is built on the same metal chassis as other Atoll components. The mechanical structure of the CD player is vital to giving it a fighting chance. High resonance is a spoiler to CD performance. CD80 runs TEN regulated power supplies! CD80 runs THREE transformers to isolate tasks. Filter capacitance is 21,400 uF which is what you’d find in a 60×2 power amp. Beefy transformers and filter caps pay off in CD performance as they do with integrated amp performance.

Atoll employs very responsive, great tracking transport mechanisms by Teac. These are CD transports, not DVD transports. Most players use DVD transports which are noisy and “revvy” as they play. Sometimes they’re raucous and you can hear them across the room.

Atoll likes Burr Brown DACs for its CD players. Atoll runs BB DACs without negative feedback which assures that your musical timbre will be more smooth and rich, than thin or edgy. Many competitors run latest greatest DAC chips with oodles of processing and require negative feedback to TAME their electronic bite. They’ll have you think that the latest-greatest with more processing is better. But in fact, this choice delivers a more harsh, thin sound. Imagine a TV picture that is more crystalline in definition, but less warm and natural in color. Atoll goes for the more warm/musical presentation, rather than a more dry/stark performance. What looks good on the spec sheet doesn’t always translate to better musical character.

We’re seeing more companies catch on to this DAC implementation. Super high end companies like Weiss of Switzerland will use high processing DACs, but only use a portion of their functionality. They’ve learned that the sound is too glassy if they let the DAC chip run the gamut.

CD80 has a surprise up its sleeve. You can access the BB DAC with other sources, most likely a streamer. CD80 has inputs of OPT, Coax and USB-B. If you’re running a nice streamer like a Bluesound, you can improve its sound by running digital OUT into one of the CD80’s DAC INPUTS.

Now you’ll be listening to the TLC of Atoll’s DAC and line stage resolution, vs what’s endemic to a highly processing chipset.

CD80 comes with an Atoll system remote, as does IN80. The single remote will run this marvelous stack I’ve recommended.

System 80 Synergy

We’ve created a great STACK of gear here!

The system starts with the Atoll CD80 as its source. If you want to stream, just run a Bluesound into CD80 to take advantage of its superior DAC. CD80 shakes hands with Atoll’s muscular IN80 integrated amp. The IN80 has the octane to drive the Axiom M80 speakers to near top of the totem pole performance. Yes, you could get a skosh more out of them with Bryston separates for $13k, but that’s well beyond the point of diminishing returns.