Music Hall a25.2 Integrated Amplifier and cd25.2 CD Player

A star and its supporting actor

Music Hall in Great Neck, New York, has long been a source of musical, mostly twochannel audio equipment. The folks there are uncannily good at finding high-performance gear that won’t break the budget. I’m thinking off the top of my head of the Creek electronics and the Epos loudspeakers. Music Hall also offers its own designs, and these two, as a package (the a25.2 integrated amp and cd25.2 CD player retail for $600 apiece), can form the basis of a good, small, and inexpensive system. They slipped easily into my small (but lively) room, with the Spendor S8e loudspeakers and Nordost Blue Heaven cabling.

Together, the Music Halls immediately showed clarity in the highs and rich detailing in the midrange, but began to run out of steam a bit in the midbass—though what was there in that range was still clear and detailed. The lower midbass was somewhat thin and sounded as if it had moved back in the soundstage. Nearfield listening ameliorated some of this by reducing the effects of the room, but did not cure it. I played around with this, as I’ll outline in a moment, but my overall assessment of the two units in tandem didn’t change much. In my rooms and systems, the Music Hall a25.2 and cd25.2 together were spectacularly and silkily transparent in the voice range and lacking a bit in body below that. That is together. One of these units, however, later rose to star performance in the heftier system. In the first sessions, with the units together, Rebecca Pidgeon’s voice in “Spanish Harlem,” from Woman of Song [Chesky Records], was clear and vibrant. On The Essential Leonard Cohen [Columbia], Cohen himself was clear and a little forward in the mix. How do you decide if you’re hearing “forwardness in the midrange” or “shyness in the midbass”? Well, it’s tricky, but I consider that a design’s strength resides with its clarity; and here that lies higher than the midbass. Cohen has a more complex backup on his music than does Pidgeon, and the nuances thereof were compromised. On orchestral music, the overall fabric of sound was not as full and rich as I want, but then I haven’t found many small systems that do reproduce orchestral works well. I seldom use “big” classical recordings to judge equipment for that very reason. The Music Halls were quite clear in all they presented. It’s just that the depth of the overall sound was thin. That natural and deeply satisfying resonance of many instruments playing together was—gee, I keep using this word—thin. It wasn’t veiled, because that indicates some distortion, and of that I heard none. A clear delicate broth rather than a hearty stew.

Even so, this pair shone on a recording I love, Fauré’s Requiem [Collegium]. The “Pie Jesu,” written for a boy soprano, is here sung by the adult Carolyn Ashton as if this child suddenly, in this very piece, discovers human mortality. Toward the end, a brief soft, deep pedal note follows the singer, stalking the voice with a hint of fearful darkness. And immediately afterward, the soprano cries, “Pie, Jesu,” now with barely controlled terror. (This effect, incidentally, I’ve found only in this recording, which is the original small-orchestra version. It was on the LP, when I had it, as well as the CD.) With the Music Halls, that stalking note was present, but distant— merely the breath of peril—and the overall effect was stunning. Later in the recording, the swirling highs of violin strings, matching the pulsing high choirs of the organ in “In paradisum,” were mesmerizing.

The Music Hall integrated offers 50 watts per channel, and it’s clean and clear. I took it into the large room (20 x 25 feet) with the spectacular Acoustic Zen loudspeakers (reviewed last issue), which don’t require tons of power, Musical Fidelity A5 CD player, and Nordost Blue Heaven cabling. My assessment of the unit remained largely unchanged. It was sparkling, transparent, and musical in the highs and mids, and began to sound a little distant in the upper bass, rolling off in the midbass. It was happier in the smaller room, with the smaller speakers.

This leads to a rather odd phenomenon, in which the unit’s strengths—spectacular highs and mids—serve to emphasize its weakness—slight midbass and bass shyness. I paired it with a better power cord (which I’ll discuss in a moment), and that improved the sense of depth and air, but did not fill in the problematic frequency range. The more expensive Musical Fidelity X-150 integrated ($900, last time I looked) sounds more balanced and musically rich—as you’d expect. I haven’t heard another comparably priced integrated in my system lately, but two to look at would be the Rotel RA-1062 ($699, reviewed in Issue 149) and the NAD C352 ($599, reviewed on our Web site AVGuide.com). Cambridge Audio also offers units in that range. But still it would surprise me if the Music Hall did not end up on your short list, just because it does what it does so very well.