As some of you may know I recently change two aspects of my system, I have moved from an Allnic T1500 300B valve SET amp to a Krell KSA-80 class A power amp, quite a change of direction. This decision was arrived at after living two years with my set up, whilst my system with the Allnic driving the Wilson Benesch speakers sounded good, there was something missing at the bottom end and sometimes I felt a punch and drive was missing in the presentation. After asking several in the know I concluded that the 300B was not as good match to the WBs as it should be, and a traditional high powered amplifier would be a better approach.

So the move to the Krell meant I needed to consider a pre-amp, at the same time I had been looking at a way to rationalise the various digital boxes I had and try to de-clutter the set up hopefully without compromising SQ overall.

I looked at several options, CDP's with DACs primarily as I wanted to get back to a better CD replay, and loose a separate DAC box, nearly all of these required a separate pre-amp in the solution. But my search lead me to the Audiolab 8300CDQ, after reading several reviews I came to the conclusion that this was probably a good choice for my budget, with the same CDP set up as the Audiolab 6000CDT, which has rave reviews as a transport, and the DAC side used the latest version of cutting-edge 32-bit ESS Sabre DAC chip, and several reviews stated that the pre-amp was actually very good, being neutral, detailed and presenting a great soundstage. The DAC will also process MQA files but this is something I am not particularly interested in.

The Audiolab 8300CDQ has five digital inputs comprising 1x asynchronous USB and 4x S/PDIF (2x coaxial and 2x optical). Hi-res digital audio is supported up to 32-bit/384kHz PCM and DSD256, and USB HID compatibility enables driverless control of a connected PC, Mac or media player. It has 3 RCA analogue inputs and output is through either RCA or Balanced outputs. The output can be set to a fixed level to go to a dedicated pre-amp, or used as a pre-amp in its own right, so it is very flexible.

On the analogue side I found out this info "It has a discrete Class A analogue stages and sophisticated power supply, circuitry includes a large, low-noise toroidal transformer, a plethora of reservoir/smoothing capacitors, an impressive number of regulator chips and discrete transistor (instead of op-amp) analogue stages at the output with ultra-low impedance to drive any cable and any load. The power supply incorporates 29 regulated supply rails including multiple ultra-low-noise regulators, with extensive measures against power supply contamination and cross-coupling.", so it should be good.

Looking at the specification overall and build quality, www.audiolab.co.uk/6000cdq/ I think Audiolab have gone to great length to produce a good piece of kit that delivers on sound quality.

So how does it sound?

I have lived with it now for nearly a week, initially I focused on listening to good old vinyl, mainly as I wanted to get familiar with the Krell amp and listen to some familiar sounds. My first impression was that this is a very good pre-amp, it is very quiet (background noise) even when turned up to very high volumes, although it is wise to be cautious when doing so with a Krell, to me it is silent, I cannot detect any hiss or noise from it. Tonally I feel that it completely neutral, music is presented as you would expect, no harshness or tonally dull, just a very natural rendition. I listened to a variety of tracks I know well by Supertramp, Peter Gabriel, Deep Purple, Alan Parsons, St Germain, Miles Davis, and Eva Cassidy to name a few and I was pleased with them all, a superb soundstage, with lovely separation and detail. I rapidly came to the conclusion that this was a pretty good piece of HiFi gear and I was confident that the Krell would show up any oddities/nasties, but I personally could find none.

So over the last 3 days I have been listening to streamed music from Qobuz and CDs, I have made sure there is no processing going on on my MacBook and the Audiolab DAC is get the raw data. I have streamed some albums/tracks already listened to on vinyl and also a few new ones, the minimum data steam I have listened to has been 16/44.1kHz and up to 24/196kHz. I have also streamed from my RPI/HiFiBerry Digi via the Coax input. I am very impressed how the Audiolab 8300CDQ presents digital music, dare I say it, it does not sound "digital", by that I mean it sounds natural, well it does with what I have listen to so far. With CDs it replays these beautifully, but I probably should try a few that I know are not the best of translation from analogue to digital back in the 80's. I have just finished listening to Radioheads - OK Computer and the amount of detail and resolution it is extracting is quite astounding, in my opinion it exceeds the sound quality I used to get from a Meridian 557 CDP, a well known highly respected CDP.

It is very easy to set up and use, and the controls are simplicity, there are digital filters and I have had a played with them a little, but have not formed a view on this yet

So to sum up I would wholeheartedly recommend this combined CDP/DAC/pre-amp, for the asking price of £1100 I think it is a bit of a bargain, I think you could spend a great deal more on other equipment to get to the same level of sound quality.

I hope some of you may find this useful, if considering one or similar devices.