High-End Audio Buyer’s Guide: Rotel RA-1592 MKII

$3199

The MKII version of the venerable RA-1592 offered rock-solid musicality across virtually all criteria, with a lush velvety character and a weighty well-defined bottom end. Its wide dynamic range imparted a bone-tingling physicality and impact to large-scale orchestral music. The treble octaves were clean, relatively free of clutter or grain. At the treble extremes there was a minor reduction of air and harmonic bloom and a scarcity of depth cues, but these were trivial subtractions. The 200Wpc Class AB powerhouse sports upgrades to all important circuits, including the capacitors in critical signal paths. Plenty flexible, the MKII supports both traditional Bluetooth streaming plus aptX^TM, AAC high-quality audio streaming, and MQA and MQA Studio decoding and rendering. The RA-1592 MKII proved itself truthful, articulate and musically compelling—what TAS has come to expect of a 50-year-old brand. (327)