Cayin Audio A-88T Tube Integrated Amplifier and SCD‑50T SACD Player

A trip down Memory Lane

I was tickled pink by Cayin Audio’s A-88T all‑tube integrated amplifier from the moment I began to unpack it. The inclusion of white gloves signaled an attention to detail in the presentation that puts to shame several super‑expensive items I’ve seen. It was even more impressive out of the box—handsome in an unapologetically retro style; ruggedly built using high‑quality parts and point‑to‑point wiring; hand‑assembled, hand‑numbered, and hand‑signed by the QC inspector. All this plus remote operation for $1900 indicates Cayin’s determination to give buyers more than just a taste of truffles at mushroom prices.

Nor is the retro style merely faceplate deep. Go to the “About Us” page on the Web site of the importer, VAS Audio Industries, and you read: “We are a group of middle‑aged die‑hard audiophiles, looking for some old ‘toys’ from our younger audiophile days.” VAS got in touch with a Chinese electronics manufacturer and designed a series of products deliberately voiced after the sonic characteristics of classic American tube‑products. A Cayin preamp is said to mimic a Marantz 7; a VAS amplifier, a Harman‑Kardon Citation II; the A‑88T integrated under review, a McIntosh MC275. When I told a couple of TAS colleagues about this, one said, “How cool!” The other, rolling his eyes, countered, “How silly!”

Whatever your reaction, it certainly hands the reviewer a conundrum. Nobody buying this product is doing so for “the absolute sound,” i.e., fidelity to some absolute standard of accuracy. It’s being bought for nostalgic reasons, to reproduce what is itself a reproduction—making it in effect a reproduction of a reproduction—one that gains its legitimacy because it harks back to the so‑called Golden Age of Audio, vinyl the primary source, vacuum tubes the only means of amplification with their glowing warmth, cozy intimacy, and distortions benign (relatively high second-order harmonic) as opposed to noxious (the crossover notch of early transistors).

This nostalgia also has its sociological aspect. Not only is a sonic aesthetic being called back into existence, but evoked as well is the era of what might be called Romantic Individualism in audio, where corporations were virtually nonexistent and both equipment and sound were the visions of pioneering individuals. Fire up one of these Cayin amplifiers, watch the tubes come softly to life, Ella dreamily spinning out a melody while Ben Webster’s tenor encircles her in ribbons of smoke and whiskey…and before you know it the whole chaotic modern world of multichannel, home theater, format wars, iPods, and computers just fades away.

Of course, those early pioneers were trying to approach the original sound as closely as they knew how given the state‑of‑the‑art as it existed back then, not someone else’s idea of it. But how can I cast the first stone—a guy who’s just bought Quad 57s for the fourth time and an Acoustic Research XA turntable for the second?

For now, let me narrow my focus to the A‑88T alone. The preamp section features a volume control, but no balance or mono circuits—odd omissions given the vintage inspiration—and three high‑level inputs; a fourth, misleadingly labeled “Preamp In,” bypasses the volume control, allowing the amplifier section to be driven by external devices (no preamp‑out jacks, however). Power into 4, 8, and 16 ohms is 45Wpc in ultralinear mode, 22 in triode, conveniently switchable from the handset. Even by the standards of their time, triodes seem to me little more than coloration generators, their principal effect to push the presence region back even further than many tube units already do, providing phony “depth” and otherwise glamorizing the presentation.

I conducted most of my evaluations in ultralinear, beginning with a glorious recital of Beethoven’s last three sonatas by Mitsuco Uchida on Philips. This was recorded in the famously reverberant Concert Hall at Snapes Malting, where Uchida applied a lot of pedal to radiant effect—no one else in my experience suggests the other‑worldly character of this music so transcendently. Driving Quad 988s, the A‑88T opened a window upon the venue and revealed Uchida’s ethereally delicate touch and exquisite tone with especially nuanced resolution of dynamics. Next up Gloryland, the new Anonymous Four recording from Harmonia Mundi, with which the A- 88T spread the four singers out slightly behind the plane of the speakers in an ideal perspective that let me hear deep into the soundfield yet concentrate on the unique timbre of each voice if I cared to. No problems, then, with imaging and soundstaging, and a quite extraordinary immediacy.