In the search for the best music experiences, it is easy to think that you have to choose a huge and heavy beast of an amplifier, that will almost blow the fuses when you turn it on. An amplifier that rattles the speakers and knocks the music out of them.
Small, neat amplifiers with streaming
This does not have to be the case. Luckily. There are small, neat amplifiers, which only take up half the space of a full-scale amplifier, but which still play music with fantastic sound quality. Amplifiers that come complete with everything you need in order to stream music wirelessly from mobile or PC. One just has to choose right, and moreover be willing to pay a little for the feast.
You can get out of it nicely with, for example, a Sonos Amp power amplifier and a pair of good compact speakers. Then you will have a great system, which together costs less than one of the amplifiers in this test. But you get so much more out of the music, if you go up a couple of quality levels.
Three premium steaming amplifiers
Here we test three all-in-one amplifiers in the premium class. All support wireless audio through both Chromecast, AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth. They also have Spotify Connect, in other words you are completely free to choose how you want to play the music from your mobile or PC. The amplifiers also have some individual tricks up their sleeves, and we can reveal first and foremost that none of them sound the same.
The cheapest in the test is the Primare I15 Prisma, and a little step above this again is the Lyngdorf TDAI-1120. They are both 60 watts, but use slightly different technology. The Lyngdorf amplifier is also the only one in the test with built-in room correction, so that it can adapt the sound from the speakers to the room.
Cambridge Audio Evo 150 reigns over these again. It is more than twice as powerful, but we will find out exactly how much further it can drive the speakers. It is also the only one of the three with headphone output, in case you want to enjoy music with a pair of cans on your head.
All three amplifiers will do much of the same thing when it comes to streaming music. They also all maintain high quality, both in sound and construction. The question will be which one is right for you, and we hope you will be wiser after reading this review.