TWO decades is a long time for an amplifier to be in production, but that’s how long the Cary Audio SLI-80 has been around… the company likens it to a Porsche 911, which first came out in the early 1960s and continues to be the car manufacturer’s main driver.
The SLI-80 is almost as legendary as the 911 in the field of integrated tube amplifiers… but it has had its day and is now succeeded by the SLI-100. The pedigree and design cues remain but the innards have been updated.
According to Cary, this dual-mono design uses the KT150 tube to deliver 100 watts of push-pull ultra-linear power.
“The SLI-100 has four line inputs and a headphone jack. With regards to the headphone circuit, it is not the circuit you get with many other products. The headphone jack in the SLI-100 is fed a pure musical signal directly from the amplifier’s output transformer.
“The SLI-100 operates in a Class AB1 mode utilising a negative fixed bias supply.The output transformers in the SLI-100 are the most important component in the amplifier and have been specifically designed by Cary Audio for use in the SLI-100.
“Negative feedback is derived from the eight-ohm tap on the output transformer secondary. This feedback circuitry is used to reduce the noise floor and improve the speaker damping characteristics. Only 4dB of feedback is utilised. The phase inverter is a self-balancing split load configuration utilising the 6SN7 octal base dual triode.
“The preamplifier circuit is a Series Regulated Push-Pull (SRPP) Class A triode voltage amplification stage direct coupled to the phase inverter. The power supply in the SLI-100 features a 200% duty cycle EI laminate power transformer.”
The SLI-100, which comes standard with a removable cage cover, has a list price of US$5,995 and is available now.
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