By the time the Munich HighEnd 2015 show had come and gone, the HD Amp cats were finally out of their satin-black bags. They'd gone tall, narrow and deep and flaunted a deeply engraved Nagra logo on their fronts plus integral outrigger footers for stability. Pricing was set at €75'000/pr. Completing front-to-back electronics were a pair of Wilson Audio Alexias which had already served Nagra well at the preceding CES show in Las Vegas.

Playing second fiddle on size and power was a pair of Classic Amps bridged to 200-watt mono. That pair played during select times to show off its brawn and thereby prove that the Classics had what it took to energize a large room with properly grown-up speakers and show-off volumes. Completing the display was a large full-metal Nagra logo rising like a full moon behind the system. According to Matthieu Latour, this had been the company's best Munich showing ever.


In final production, the rear panel of the compact Classic Amp had grown patterned vent holes to move the address line to the bottom but otherwise matched the rendering of our opening page to perfection. With first production sold out to fill dealer/distributor orders in the show's wake, I had to wait out summer vacations, the subsequent launch of the second run and the CES show.

A pair touring in Europe—demo setup at the Acoustic Gallery of Paris below—began to spread the word. With their bridged Classic Amp, Nagra finally had the right stuff to commandeer big speakers in big spaces without running out of power or drive; and without exploiting their herculean amps.

By CES 2016, the new 100wpc Classic INT enjoyed a preview for its planned May 2016 launch. It showed in a system with CDP and Seven sources, new Classic DAC, an MPS power supply, Transparent cables, Modulum racks and Wilson Sabrina speakers. Nagra's Classic line was clearly expanding. Its new DAC borrows the DSD front end of the HD DAC, then eliminates the headphone amp and volume control and replaces the tube stage with 9 military-grade transistors per channel for an unweighted S/NR of 145dB. At this rate, I expected that perhaps the Melody preamp might soon see itself made over into a Classic model given how both it and my Jazz now occupied limbo land between Classic and HD lines. With neither the Classic DAC, AMP or INT sporting tubes, perhaps this cookie was crumbling into solid-state and tube ranges? If so, the Jazz would presumably get made over and upgraded into an HD preamp. To learn for sure, I had to wait for Matthieu Latour to return from Las Vegas. As a teaser, he had forwarded the next photos which I regrouped into a collage.