High End 2014 • Hot Product

High End 2014 saw the public unveiling of the new A10000DHT amplifiers from tube iconoclasts Allnic. With an asking price of $89,000 for a pair of monoblocks, you’d be right to expect something special, and Kang Su Park’s latest offerings are certainly striking. The new amps use the same custom KR242 tube developed for the H5000DHT phono stage, but in this case it’s to drive a parallel pair of the massive Kron 1610 output tubes. As if the tubes (each the size of a vodka bottle) aren’t big enough, Allnic encases them in Allnic's trademark clear, column cages, adding further height and girth. The resulting twin chimneys tower over the low-slung, almost square chassis, leaving observers in no doubt as to where the owner’s audio sympathies lie.

Of course, the attraction of big tubes is that they offer big power without the compromises, complexity and matching issues that go with ganged output devices. For the A10000DHT, that’s 100 class-A, SET watts from each parallel pair, with the amps offering a choice of balanced or single-ended inputs and 4- or 8-ohm output taps to further aid system/speaker matching.

But other big SET output tubes (notably 211s and 845s) have historically struggled to match their undoubted power and presence with the resolution, transparency and dynamic discrimination to offer a truly balanced musical performance. Can the combination of Allnic and the Kron 1610 finally crack that egg? It wasn’t possible to make serious judgments at the show, but given the sonic sensibilities expressed in other Allnic products, that looks like a definite possibility.