Bricasti Designs is on a roll with two new products at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest this year: The M15 Stereo Amplifier ($18,000 USD), and the M12 Dual Mono Source Controller ($15,995). Co-founder, and company president Brian Zolner was excited by the extremely positive response to the M12, and the M15 at the show, and said many painstaking hours had gone into the design, and construction of both.
The big power amplifier sits on beefy isolation footers, and looks the part of brute force, while the sleek pre-amplifier, and source controller M12 is a perfect visual match up. Use both with a pair of transducers, and a digital source, and that’s all she wrote as the saying goes. You can eliminate a lot of extra boxes, and cables with just these two units, which as Zolner pointed out, makes them a lot more attractive for a shared space – like a living room for example – as opposed to a box, rack, and cable-choked man cave.
The system in Denver consisted of the M28 Monoblock Amplifers ($15,000 USD each), the M15 Stereo Amplifier ($18,000 USD), the M12 Dual Mono Source Controller with ethernet connection ($15,995 USD), the M1 DAC (DSD128! $10,000 USD). The absolutely drool-worthy Tidal Audio Piano Diacera G2 loudspeakers ($39,900 USD) were being fed via ZenSati cabling, and as usual were doing one of the damnedest imitations of real musicians living and breathing as they played with spectral holography between the big German transducers.
To me this was a system that spoke to music lovers who not only want speed on leading edges of notes, pitch accuracy in their instruments and humanity in voice reproduction, but who also don’t mind spinning the volume past noon. Not only did this kit handle low-level listening with aplomb, but when dBs started arcing towards triple digits, sonic cohesion was strictly maintained, and one was left with a sense of unflappable composure.
