What Hi-Fi? Verdict
Plinius isn’t a household name, but if this product is anything to go by, it deserves to be
Pros
- Immense punch and control
- speed and agility combined with an impressively powerful bass performance
- fine build and finish
Cons
- Lean balance means you have to take care in system-matching
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Like your music loud? Read on. This Plinius M8 preamp/P10 power amp combo revels in antisocial volume levels, while delivering the kind of kick and clarity few rivals can match.
Plinius is an established specialist brand from New Zealand that’s never quite had the UK marketing push it deserves. We hope that changes, because this pre/power is something special.
You already know it likes to play loud, but it’s also detailed, transparent and extremely agile. This is a fast, exciting amplifier that thrives on hard-charging beats and complex rhythms. Feed it OutKast’s The Love Below, and it responds with enthusiasm. Complex tracks holds no fear: individual instrumental strands remain clear when the music gets busy.
Tonally, the Plinius has just a hint of top-end brightness, but matched with something refined and transparent, such as the ProAc D28 floorstanders (£3250), you’ll get a stonking sound that’s hard to beat for the money.
Does the deed getting down low
The M8/P10 pair’s most impressive strength is bass replay: the low frequencies are taut and tuneful, yet pack a hefty punch. With the right material, say The Battle from the Gladiator OST or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Mustt Mustt, and an appropriate system, we can’t think of another rival that betters it.
This amp does subtle, too: there’s plenty of finesse and fine stereo-imaging. It also looks tidy, and is built like a pair of bricks, with a neat remote. Overall, this is one terrific preamp, and one that easily justifies its stratospheric price tag.
| My Kharmas admittedly made for a leisurely load. With their very reasonable 90dB efficiency and an impedance plot which barely slips below 8 ohms, they were ideally spec’d to convince me of the extra-musical charms of class A bias. Particularly whenever I served up voices or acoustic instruments, its sensibly silken textures really did approach valve designs to a surprising degree. With the Gamut PHI3 mini monitors’ lower sensitivity the Plinius amp had no issue either to get these simple but properly implemented constructions to sing. From such small boxes true bass below 60Hz was obviously absent regardless of being fronted by such top-shelf amplification. Even so I switched back to class A/B mode for a look-see. The additional horse power had the small 15cm mid/woofer dish out such poignant and grippy 100Hz upper bass that only a direct comparison to the larger Kharmas recalibrated my hearing for a proper perspective on the subject. With the rest of the audible band following suit to sound perfectly self-assured and balanced, I routinely found myself in disbelief that I really was listening to speakers whose baffles are smaller than a sheet of writing paper. Given such applause for the SA-103’s excellent drive, just how should the preamp preceding it be rated which clearly had its own say in these matters? | |||||||||||||||
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| No doubt the M8 was a tonally very colorful and dynamically exceptionally astute partner. This energetic pressurized personality translated intact also to my Mudra monos. The Plinius preamp combined depth layering with the type of spatial illumination which favors panoramic width over the last word in explorations of the stage gear. Other preamps I’m familiar with exhibit even greater analytical powers to unearth a seeming overabundance of detail. Such tendencies the M8 countered with a wonderfully physical depiction of instruments and performers. Clearly this was no machine which mistook resolution for a morgue’s vivisection. | |||||||||||||||
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