Price

The 6000A MkII is available in the UK for £699; a price that represents a £50 increase over the outgoing 6000A.

Never in the entire time that I have been writing for Trusted Reviews has quoting a US Dollar price seemed so fraught with the feeling that it’ll be completely different when the review is published but the current quoted price seems to be in the region of $1,400 USD; a reflection that the 6000A MkII is made in China and will be subject to some volatility for the foreseeable future. The Australian retail price is $1,799 AUD.

At the time of writing, there are some examples of the older MkI version of the amplifier for sale which are cheaper than the MkII and do represent good value if your budget is tight. There is also a 6000A Play which remains on sale. This includes streaming built in but it’s built around the original 6000A and is not the same as the MkII.

Design

• Elegant ‘intelligent retro’ design…
• … with an aerial sticking out the back
• Useful display and a full remote control

The 6000A MkII might not look it at first glance but it is a genuinely clever piece of industrial design. If you don’t have any interest in the history of Audiolab, it’s a clean and modern bit of metalwork.

It is a full width unit that makes use of three knobs for control; volume, input and a select function to interact with the display (more in a bit). It feels uncluttered and elegant and the Audiolab looks particularly good in silver (black is also available). It looks every inch the piece of modern hi-fi that it is.

If you are a… bit more involved (a polite way of saying ‘a bit sad’) like me, you’ll notice there are some design touches which link the 6000A MkII all the way back to the beginning of the company.

The power button on the right hand side of the chassis instead of the left and the careful use of the same logo and fonts as was the case in the eighties and nineties, means that the 6000A MkII has enough design details to be identifiably Audiolab. Even the slender nature of the design harks back to the original 8000A. It’s also beautifully bolted together.

Not everything is perfect though. The 6000A MkII has Bluetooth as I shall cover. Where rivals like the Fell Amp and Arcam Radia A5 use an aerial built into the casework, the Audiolab has a prominent aerial that does mess with the lines a bit. It’s not the end of the world but it’s not as elegant a solution as some other companies have managed to find.

It’s also possible to argue that the remote is a bit on the fussy side too. It has a great many buttons and not all of them have a great deal to do with the amp. The caveat to this is that the handset will drive a full Audiolab system which is handy.

You also get a display on the front panel which is a useful way of showing the volume and input you have selected and accessing some of the other features on the amp itself.

Specification

• 50 watts of class AB power
• Analogue inputs and phono stage
• New digital board with HDMI eARC
• Bluetooth and headphone support

As befitting the decision to call the 6000A MkII rather than a 6001 or similar is a reflection that the basics of the amp remain very similar to the original.

The amplifier section is a Class AB design and produces an output of 50 watts into 8 ohms as the older model which rises to 75 watts into 4. These aren’t monster numbers but they should be more than enough for most domestic needs.

Audiolab has also worked at boosting the numbers that help real world power delivery. Maximum current delivery has risen to 11 amps from 9 and there is increased voltage on offer from the power supply and secondary windings.

Analogue connectivity is also unchanged but this is because there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Three RCA inputs are joined by a moving magnet phono stage that has been revised based on feedback gained from its ongoing development and use in a wide selection of products.

Where the 6000A MkII is quite different to most rivals is that it is fitted with both a stereo preout and a direct power in which means it can act as a preamp and a power amp which is potentially rather handy.

There are more significant changes to the digital board. The old ES9018K2M DAC that has featured in Audiolab products for many years has been replaced with an ES9038Q2M. This uses 32 bit architecture and is employed in proprietary circuitry fed by a dedicated power supply, designed to exploit the DAC’s considerable potential.

Audiolab has done this without affecting the price too much by leveraging economies of scale to make use of the board from the more expensive 7000A integrated to do this.

As before, this board offers two optical and two coaxial inputs which support for sample rates up to 24-bit/192kHz. I can argue that USB would have been a nice addition but the 6000A MkII gains an HDMI eARC input instead. This greatly simplifies use with a TV and puts the Audiolab in a rather smaller group of competing products. It’s not perfect though.

The Audiolab ships with the CEC function that syncs the amp to the TV disengaged and it has had once instance of stopping communicating altogether with one of the test screens (admittedly, a fairly elderly LG B8 OLED) requiring the cable to be disconnected and reattached before I heard audio again. There are some rivals that do this better.

This also means that the 6000A MkII gains the same Bluetooth implement as the 7000A which is no bad thing, even if you do have that aerial to contend with. It supports aptX HD and AAC for optimal connections with iOS and Android and has proved very stable in use. As well as a single set of speaker terminals on the rear, you also get a headphone socket on a 6.35mm connection.

Performance

• A well-judged balanced of refinement and energy
• Brilliant digital board
• Capable of true greatness… if you partner it well

One of the reasons why the original 6000A was as influential as it was, came down to how it sounded. There was very little at the price that was as able to walk the same balance of delivery energy and excitement and partner it with the refinement and control to make your less perfect material sound good too.

The good news for all concerned is that the 6000A MkII does nothing to upset this balance.

Tested with a Bluesound Node Nano, using the analogue inputs to begin with, the way that the 6000A MkII gets stuck into the eponymously titled album from Audioslave is a great demonstration of what  it does so well.

This is still the sonic equivalent of being smacked in the face – the mastering is intentionally a massive, all-encompassing wall of sound and the Audiolab does a fine job of conveying it. What it manages to do at same time is reduce the effects of the congestion and compression that can be actively unpleasant at times. You can wind the volume on and revel in the sheer force of the material on display.

This news gets even better if you swap the Nano over to one of the digital inputs. The board in the 6000A MkII isn’t really night and day different to the sound of the Nano but, when you consider that the Bluesound is getting on for half the price of the Audiolab it means that, so long as it has a digital output, you don’t need to spend very much on your digital front end at all.

The beautifully mastered and recorded The Warmth You Deserve by Stranded Horse isn’t ‘good’ for the digital input on a affordable amplifier, it’s just plain good. The Audiolab is a great listen via Bluetooth too; I used my old Oppo Find X5 Pro; now relegated to a Bluetooth test device for some listening and found myself deeply impressed.

Is Qobuz via the Bluesound better? Yes… but it’s closer than you might expect it to be. It might be a convenience feature but it sounds genuinely good.

In fact, the 6000A MkII keeps chalking up points regardless of how you use it. The HDMI eARC might have some operational quirks but the performance it offers is consistently good.

The Audiolab does the important thing of keeping dialogue locked on screen while expanding information around it in a way that is just as effective for Gladiators as it is Reacher. The phono stage also puts in a decent showing too but it’s here that the 6000A MkII has to give some ground to the Rega Brio Mk7 which was on test at the same time.

The 6000A MkII’s phono stage is quiet and has plenty of gain but it never quite sounds as enjoyable as the one in the Brio. There are tiny and maddeningly subjective moments where the Audiolab simply isn’t quite as musically satisfying as the Rega has been.

There is a caveat to this to this that is definitely worth bearing in mind. For most of the testing I carried out, the used with the Q Acoustics 5010, Acoustic Energy AE309² and briefly with the Neat Petite Classic, the Rega had the edge over the Audiolab. It simply delivered a sound I wanted to listen to for longer.

When I ran some tests with a pair of Mission 700s though; a speaker made by a sister company to Audiolab, the result was sensational; better than the sum of its parts and not something that the Rega was able to match. It’s wrong to say that the Audiolab is ‘hard’ to partner because it will drive most speakers happily and sound decent with all of them. More considered choices will unlock an extra level of performance though.

Should you buy it?

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