Cary SI-300.2d Integrated

All in due time @tonyb Letting it burn in a little bit before moving over to Mezzo Utopias for comparison to other amps. I barely got the meter needles off zero last night

@erniejade Having the speaker binding posts on the top row is different, but no issue so far...although I've only hooked-up a digital input for now. Once I use the line inputs (directly below the speaker posts), we'll see how that goes.

Harry, I got my Vita from our very own @ZLTFUL several months ago. It can stream just about any service under the sun, but it is only a player, so requires a separate DAC. Mine has 1TB of internal SSD storage as well.

Here's a pic of them together, but I'm afraid it's not staged very well. My rack is pretty elementary...someday I'll upgrade.

Mike Reeter wrote: »

jdjohn, that's a nice stash of Cartridges you have! I see a Rogue Audio Triton also, what do you have for a TT?

Thanks, Mike! Yeah...I went pretty deep down the cartridge rabbit hole, so have accumulated quite a few I do love my Triton, for sure. At some point, I may move up the Rogue line a little further, but I'm happy for now.

I have [cough] 20 turntables at the moment, so a bit of a hoarding problem there Most of them are of the vintage variety, with my most 'modern' one being a Clearaudio Concept w/ MC. In that pic above, if I were to zoom out, you would see a little Technics SL-J2 linear tracker that I've been re-habbing out of my dad's collection. No one should underestimate those little turntables!

I'm ready to share some of my thoughts regarding the sound of this unit.

At critical listening volumes (and higher), it sounds exceptional. There is a weight to the music, and as mentioned earlier, everything is under wonderful control. At adequate volume levels, there is a nice mid-range bloom that appears somewhat unexpectedly, which fills out the frequency range nicely. I'll have more to say on the volume. The soundstage is expansive (seemed to add a foot or so on each side), and imaging/separation is spot-on.

Overall, the sound is on the warmer side, which (I think) may be typical of the Cary house sound. Honestly, I'm normally tilted towards a cooler, brighter sound, but this is really nice. I like the authority of the Cary, and it still retains enough high-end detail to satisfy me. The bass is strong and tight, but don't confuse 'tight' with "weak, yet detailed". I don't use a sub-woofer with my Mezzo Utopias, but at times with the Cary, it sounded (and felt) like a sub was in use, especially with some electronic music. Impressive.

Okay, more regarding the volume. To put it quantitatively: at level 20, it sounded okay, but not quite filled-out; at 30, everything came to life, but we're no longer at low volume. Whether or not this is acceptable comes down to a user's situation. With a dedicated listening space where a higher volume is the norm, this Cary fits the bill. With more of a living/listening space, where late-night listening needs to be at a lower volume, using this unit might be frustrating, and considered underutilized.

To say it another way, I would say the volume control is not exactly linear - it is more logarithmic. Even going from 25 to 30 can be the difference between having a conversation with someone in the same room, or not. In contrast, I find the (class-D) PS Audio S300 more linear in volume response, and with a flatter frequency response all the way through the range. This Cary needs to hit at least 25 or 30 in order to fill-out properly IMO. But, once it does fill-out, only your eardrums and speaker response are the limiting factors. It has LOTS of headroom, and comes into its own at higher volumes.

This amp is very quiet. I was tempted to say it is quiet 'for class A/B', but it is just flat-out quiet, regardless. Some people may furrow their brows at that 'for A/B' comment, but again contrasting to the PSA S300 class-D, I have found class-D to be the most quiet. This Cary class-A/B is as quiet, or maybe more so Dark background, whatever you want to call it, this Cary has it.

Back to features - this integrated pretty much has it all (in terms of 2-channel)...except for a headphone jack Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB, incorporated DAC, HT by-pass, excellent remote control, and power galore Don't underestimate the power of this beast - 300WPC > 8 ohms; 450WPC > 4 ohms. It should drive just about anything. Because of this, it does need room to breathe for heat dissipation, especially on top.

Styling and build-quality are top-notch, which I think is typical for Cary products.

Appendum: I did not evaluate the TruBit oversampling feature for the DAC. Please search online for other reviews that look more closely into that feature.

P.S. The Cary folks did eventually reply to my email about successfully connecting via USB to other devices, and they were thankful for the information.