Emillé KI-120 Integrated Amplifiers

Emillé and their amplifiers hail from Korea, which, in this day and age, is hardly unusual. Which is not the same as saying that the Emillé KI-120s are not unusual…

Integrated valve amps from the Far East are far from unusual. Barely a week goes by without some new Chinese brand washing up on these shores. But don’t go assuming that the KI-120s are simply part of the crowd…

The CNC machined casework that once separated up-market offerings from their value for money siblings might have become virtually ubiquitous, but that’s not to say that the Emillé amps lack a distinctive character…

In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t have seen anything quite like the KI-120s ever before. They’re big, distinctly retro, beautifully finished, and there’s two of them. Oh, and did I say that they’re big… And whilst monoblocs, valve mono-blocs, beautifully machined and built valve mono-blocs are not exactly unusual, in this case these two unfeasibly large cases constitute a single, integrated amplifier – and yes, I know that’s an oxymoron.

Each KI-120 carries a quartet of 6550 output tubes, running in class AB push-pull to deliver 120 Watts of power. Each chassis offers one balanced and five single-ended inputs, with front-panel controls for source select, volume, power on/off and biasing the output tubes. The fifth control switches the front-panel meter between bias duties and displaying output power. With that big ol’ meter and shoebox configuration, octet of glowing valves and open chassis, there’s no escaping the carefully judged “dawn of hi-fi” feel that radiates from the KI-120, underlined by the fact that you need two of them and there’s no remote control. Indeed, they’d qualify as cute if anybody made a rack big enough to get a pair side by side on a single shelf. Instead they come across as seriously retro and seriously funky, yet in a seriously serious kind of way. It’s an impression that’s reinforced by the “treasure chest” crates in which the amps arrive, packaging that goes beyond the kind of gimmicky ostentation that tends to afflict high-end aspirants, instead entering firmly into the realm of genuine reverence for the contents. The people who build these amplifiers are clearly seriously serious about them too…

The Emillé amps are each built into a massively sturdy chassis constructed from 8mm aluminium plates, reinforced at each corner by 48mm quadrants machined from solid rod. The flat panels, exposed fixings and simple shapes are what actually establish the retro theme; no swoopy curves or sculpted, contoured reliefs here. The open top-plate is protected front and top by thick, Perspex panels, held in place by the top caps. The bottom caps conceal nicely executed, adjustable, conical feet, which are sensibly radiused to prevent instantaneous damage to any supporting surface. The simple, cylindrical control knobs are reassuringly solid, the volume control having crisp detents to allow easy channel balancing.

Valve line-up consists of those four 6550s per channel, combined with a single 6DJ8 and three 6350s, presumably carrying out input, phasesplitter and driver duties, although the manual is short on circuit details. The audio circuitry is built onto a single, neatly laid out PCB loaded with high-quality “name brand” components while the housing at the rear contains the impressively substantial transformers and supports a separate, similarly substantial power supply PCB. You get one balanced and five single-ended line inputs, an earth post and an IEC mains input. You also get output taps for four and eight Ohm speakers and that’s pretty much it; no frivolities, no unnecessary facilities – and no tape loop, should you want to use a surround sound processor.

Thankfully, the long slots on either sides of the valve bed make excellent handles, so moving the KI-120s isn’t the chore it could be despite their significant weight. Biasing is also perfectly straightforward, so getting the amps up and running is totally fuss-free – assuming you’ve got somewhere to keep the crates, or kids with a Pirates Of The Caribbean fixation…

I also received a KPE-2AS phonostage to go with the mono-blocs, and again it’s a twin chassis tube design, although sadly in this instance it’s split by circuitry and power supply rather than left and right channels. MC input is via transformers, with high and low impedance settings, an ECC82 and two ECC83s being shared between the beautifully laid out, dual mono active circuitry, while front panel controls set input loading and overall gain. Case work and component quality are absolutely first class, the extreme solidity of the two chassis doing nothing to undermine their severe dose of the cutes.