LOTUS SUGGESTED SYSTEMS 2023

Welcome to Lotus suggested systems 2023. I first wrote a similar article back in 2017 and it proved very popular. Since then technology, products and prices have changed dramatically. Given that this hobby of ours is all about finding magically synergistic combinations, creating beautiful alchemy with a carefully curated recipe of differing products, a new and updated version of suggested systems would not go amiss. This time around though I would like to photograph and explore each setup for real; no easy or quick task in itself. As a result I will be publishing each suggested system in isolation when time permits, and then at some stage, conflate them all into one master article. I hope you enjoy the results.

We begin with our most popular and most important system of the last 2 years. This is not an easy system to describe, in part because its simplicity, its modest specification, two box form factor and indeed its price tag so completely belie its astonishing level of sound quality. Most of this system came about because of trickle down technology from Tidal’s highly ambitious Bugatti project, the factory’s no holds barred multi million pound effort to build the very best hifi system they could for the world’s number one manufacturer of hypercars. So an appreciation of that project will help to describe what we have here.

First a few facts to set the stage. This system (except combined with the Contriva loudspeakers which in pure quality terms are really the same as the Piano) would have been nominated as Parttimeaudiophile’s best system of the entire Munich High End show in June 2023, had it not been for the flagship Tidal for Bugatti system also being present; so he awarded it second best sound of show. If you have ever been to the Munich event, you will understand that that alone is a fairly alarming revelation given the complexity, cost and elaborateness of most of the big hitter rooms there every year. Two slimline boxes, one XLR, a 12kg class D amplifier, best sound of the biggest Hifi show on the planet, bar the Bugatti system which was sitting in the far end of the very same room. Other publications of course have since heaped similar accolades on both these setups, a few of which have been linked to from my News section.

One would be forgiven for underestimating the performance of a system that does not split the front end up into Streamer, DAC, Clock and Upsampler, the amplification into preamp, monoblock power amps either class A or AB, and the Loudspeakers into towering multi-driver 200kg+ floorstanders. But as mentioned the electronics here came about because of the gargantuan effort by Tidal during their creation of the flagship Bugatti system which necessitated small footprint electronics and simple mode of operation. Tidal not only achieved this end to remarkable effect (the Royale speakers are half the size of the La Assoluta but outperform them in every metric) but they also discovered that by combining elements and shortening or even removing pathways and socketry, the sonic gains were enormous. More complex and bigger is not always better,

The Contros front end then is essentially the Bugatti MC-1 digital front end reworked as a Tidal. Inside the single chassis is an Arkas derived streamer mated to a Camira Mk2 DAC and an ingenious non-digital volume control which is quite possibly even more transparent than the Prisma Preamp. If you did split Contros up into those component pieces and bought the extra required cables too, the cost would be somewhere around £125,000. Well over twice the price.

Exactly how good are these individual components ? Well they are all the best I can sell you. The Arkas is our highest performing streamer and the same sonic level as the well regarded Taiko SGM Extreme, the Camira is currently the best DAC I sell and the Prisma preamp will hold its own against its older brother the £70,000 Precensio. Put another way, this front end would walk all over the source and preamp from the best and most expensive suggested system from my 2017 article, Melco N1-ZS/Camira Mk1/Precensio, which at that time was state of the art. It’s almost half the money too.

Moving on to the Intra power amp, the Bugatti Royale speakers use a number of these in active form encased within each 500lb loudspeaker. As a Tidal it was born as a single featherweight and highly compact stereo power and yes – sharp intake of breath – it was conceived as a Class D design to satisfy space and heat requirements but the factory spent a long time and an awful lot of hard work deciphering why Class D typically sounds so brittle and sterile and how it could be made to sound like a true Tidal. The answer lay not in just one ground breaking technology but a whole array of small steps and accompanying solutions.

The result is indeed a true Tidal, even more Tidal in fact than its predecessor if truth be told. It is half the size and a third of the weight of the outgoing and much loved Class AB Impulse yet unbelievably it is actually more liquid, more harmonically adept and simply more see through and a grade purer again. In the case of one Tidal customer, the Class D Intra was “sweeter and more tonally glowing” than his very exotic and expensive 300B Triode amplifiers which it replaced, not to mention way faster, dynamic and grainless. We had another customer upgrade from his £60,000 premium high end Mono blocks into the Intra too. Sure the huge and optically impressive big name monos had larger ultimate grunt but the Intra at less than half the money and in a discreet box you could lift with one hand, was simply more transparent, more invisible and a lot more musical.