Much to the amplifier’s credit, I can be brief, as it simply matches or even “eclipses” most of the competition in very nearly all the usual parameters. Neutrality, linearity, low-level resolution, transparency, focus, refinement, air, spaciousness, and the list goes on. In all of these parameters, the Eclipse equals or betters any other amplifier I heard so far, including the CH. But this is where it gets really interesting as the amp takes all these qualities and adds unbelievable flow and what seems like eternal sustain. With typical transistor amplifiers, especially those with many parallel output devices, intermodulation distortion spoils the party by adding smear and making successive notes blur into one another. The opposite can also happen, with a distinct black hole between successive notes, which can be interpreted as a lack of self-noise but, in reality, could potentially be a result of limitations in the design. In real life, there is no intermodulation distortion, and there is never 100% silence between any two sounds. Rather, the sounds tend to linger on and decay naturally. This is where the Eclipse truly shines: instead of the aforementioned blurring on the one hand or black-hole choppiness on the other, it sounds utterly natural and gloriously non-transistor-like. The Eclipse has absolutely astounding low-level resolution but presents it in a natural, decidedly non-electronic, fully organic manner: fluidly and continuously and never etched.

If I had been seated in this system without knowing better, I would not have guessed a transistor amplifier produced this ultra-liquid and free-flowing performance, let alone one with a complex switching power supply and vanishingly low distortion. Adding to this, the amp has an unusually high damping factor but portrays absolutely zero of the typical aspects one would normally associate with such a design, such as overdamping or suffocating control. Evidently, all these properties do not necessarily lead to an aseptic performance but can also achieve the inverse!

There is an utter absence of transistor-like behavior, and the Eclipse excels in aspects that I would normally ascribe to a tube amp but without any coloration, thickness, slowness, or added bloom. Oh, there’s rich texturing and deep tonal saturation, but only when this is in the recording.

When the Eclipse was just powered on, it performed more or less on par with the CH A1.5. But when comparing it now, fully warmed-up, the Eclipse makes the A1.5 sound comparatively coarse and dry and, most of all, rather matter-of-fact. This came as quite a shock. So far, the A1.5 has made all other transistor amplifiers sound like, well, transistor amps. More specifically, one of the CH amp’s key strong aspects was that it so successfully avoided sounding like a transistor amp and offered fluidity, refinement, and air not normally available from a big transistor power amp. The Halcro is tonally just a little bit warmer but otherwise just as neutral and essentially free of inherent character. It sounds relaxed yet nimble, fast, and spritely. In addition, it is even silkier, more free-flowing, and incomparably more liquid. Even difficult recordings with many overlapping instruments in complex arrangements retain perfect definition and despite its relaxed and fluid nature, the amplifier simply refuses to clog up. All this amounts to a sonic rendition that is, perhaps most of all, natural and lifelike.

Link do recenzji: Halcro Eclipse Stereo – Hifi-Advice

You haven’t lived the audio life until you experience the Eclipse Stereo’s alluring and informative midrange performance. It’s not just wide open and teeming with information, it is surprisingly lyrical and liquid. Through the Eclipse Stereo you can analyse the smallest detail to your heart’s desire but you can also now dance around the room while doing it. You can peer into the darkest recesses of the recorded space with incomparable illumination and insight. But turn your back on the system and you are literally on stage with the performers. It’s an exhilarating, mind-altering experience and one that I have never before so palpably and physically encountered in all my years listening to high-end audio. The EL34-based VTL MB-185 Series III monos are more forward and have larger, more panoramic imaging. They have that tube push with greater bass drive and rhythmic propulsion. The hybrid Robert Koda K-70s have more technicolour tonal exposition and contrast. Tellingly, neither amplifier sounds quite as at home driving the 97dB efficient Koechel horns as the invisible Halcro Eclipse Stereo. The “best amplifier in the world”? It just got better.

In operation, the Eclipse Stereo is as silent as a Benedictine monk riding a half-pipe on the finest Spitfire wheels. Reproduction of every deep sinew of detail is bedazzling. The amplifier’s discrimination of transients inspires awe. The Halcro also has the most supple timing this side of the now immortal Charlie Watts, especially on the new minimal path input. The Eclipse Monos with their separate power supplies, infinite channel separation and extra storage capacitance must be truly terrifying. The fact that this is only Halcro Eclipse Season One comprehensively shakes my audio firmament.

The Eclipse Stereo gives up none of the traditional Halcro virtues. But the new amplifier gives a whole lot more enchilada in terms of musical persuasion, engagement and outright satisfaction. To these guttersnipe ears, even the most impressive Halcro amplifiers of yore could sound too lab coat, particularly in the wrong system, and a tad lean and harmonically threadbare. Lamentably, this is the accepted sound of so much extreme high-end audio even today. All that glitz to get no soul. Now, the Eclipse series has persuasively and seductively redressed the balance. Tonally as well as musically, you get more animal, less audiophile machine. Now, there is not just a sense of correctness but also a sense of rightness. It’s as if, as Lou Reed might say, the Eclipse Stereo is drawing new musical and emotional life from electricity that comes from other planets rather than your grotty home AC. It’s as if the new owners spent quality time with Swedish anarcho-punks Refused and discovered the “Liberation Frequency” of musical reproduction, the alchemical “sounds of liberation”, not by adding “New Noise” but by removing even more of it.

Over every conceivable sonic parameter the Halcro Eclipse Stereo amplifier exhibits a new freedom from sonic artifice and artefacts. Give it time/leave it on. Even from start-up its hits you on all cylinders: The complete absence of the usual electronic colourations that impede you from getting closer to the real thing. It feels like the usual sonic brake lines you’re used to hearing in high-end audio amplification have suddenly been cut. Yet, there is no loss of steering or organisation or control. The Halcro amplifier has evident authority, and is evidently ultra-clean sounding. But this is not the sound of transistorised sterility and restraint, or of stiff lip high-end polish and politesse. It can get down and dirty and dance the hard boogie exceptionally well when the music demands it.

Link do recenzji: Halcro Eclipse Stereo – SoundStage Australia

The other immediate impression this amplifier creates is one of massive power held under ruthless control, as is evidenced by conductor Gustavo Dudamel's self-released Wagner sampler with the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela [48kHz/24-bit, via qobuz.com]. The way the amplifier hints at the drama about to be unleashed in the low opening chords of the 'Götterdämmerung' prologue is spine-chilling, but don't be too tempted to turn up the volume to listen even more closely as the final, explosive power will quite possibly rearrange your furniture. There's glorious fluidity in the brass and woodwind, and the violins as they take up the theme, with the building of volume as the orchestra swells just totally natural. It's thrilling stuff.

All that clout and control also serves the driving beats and multiple layers of Bonobo's 'Otomo', from his Fragments album [Ninja Tune, ZENDNL 279]. The bass is tight, but oh so deep, and the ethereal vocal both clear and distant. Want the full deep house experience? Go on, then – crank the volume: it just gets louder, with no smear or loss of definition, but just great big pounding beats, the higher percussion clattering excellently above the low stuff, fizzing and buzzing electronica and a totally unstoppable drive. If your speakers can take it, the Eclipse will seemingly do it.

On which subject, at this point in my listening notes there's a telling line: it says, 'I don't think I've ever heard these big B&Ws driven so convincingly', and that's going some given the range of amplification we've heard fronting the 800 D4 series Diamond flagships in PM's listening room. Here, under the total control of the Halcro Eclipse Stereo, I got the impression they were really doing what they were built to deliver.

But the musical thrills kept on coming, deepening my affinity for this remarkable amplifier. With The Sixteen's latest release, A Watchful Gaze, on its Coro label [COR16195; 96kHz/24-bit], the Eclipse illuminates both the voices and the musicianship of the ensemble as it marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Byrd. Every note and syllable is crystal clear, and there's a wonderful sense of the voices hanging in, and decaying into, the reverberant acoustic of All Hallows, Gospel Oak.

Bring it down to the intimate trio jazz of Estonian pianist Tõnu Naissoo's 'Broken Hopes', on his Turning Point album, remastered from the original Melodiya analogue release [APSoon Recordings APS02023; DSD64], and the Eclipse's 'maximum information' presentation is perfectly suited to the music, creating that magical 'in the room' presence. It's a trick it also pulls off with Van Morrison's rootsy Moving On Skiffle album [Exile/Virgin Music 4819141]. Here the old boy's world-weary voice is delivered with great character and focus, and the joyful performances of the band, with every contribution easily heard, add to the retro, light-touch feel.

This really is an amplifier for all musical styles, and entirely addictive. It may have its roots in one (exceptional) man's obsessions, and be imbued with a stack of myth and mystery, but this is a sensational revival of a legendary design, and entirely capable of rearranging your perception of music.

Link do recenzji: Halcro Eclipse Stereo – Hi-Fi News

On Bardo, the following track, you’ll hear Blacka’s double-bass sounding like nothing you’ve ever heard before, as he delivers miraculous high-frequency overtones that make a mockery of the instrument’s normally accepted frequency range. The Eclipse Stereo delivers the entire gamut perfectly – the delivery is sonically contiguous, despite the rarity of the nature of the sound. When the drum kit comes in, at about 1:30, the accuracy with which the amplifier delivers the kick drum sound in exact syncopation with the high-hat strikes, all while keeping each in its own sonic envelope, and with no unwanted overhang, is an object lesson in the importance of state-of-the-art amplification in an audio reproduction chain. The Halcro Eclipse also maintained the ‘airiness’ of the acoustic as a constant throughout – a subtlety that eludes lesser amplifiers.

The buzzy, insect-like opening to One Hundred Moons highlighted for me the complete lack of background noise from the Eclipse Stereo’s circuitry – the amplifier makes no noise at all other than what is actually in the audio signal delivered to it. There is no low-frequency hum, no high-frequency hiss, and absolutely no modulation of the lowest-level background sounds on a track. Such sounds issue from an inky-black silence that is so silent it’s almost mesmerising in and of itself. The simplicity of the percussion and piano on this track is a musical antidote to what has gone before, and the crystalline clarity of the sound I heard from the Eclipse Stereo was simply amazing, a testament to the complete lack of audible distortion.

If you’d rather test out the Halcro Eclipse Stereo’s enormous power reserves and bass delivery with music that’s not so ‘out there’, I recommend revisiting – or listening to for the first time! – Talking Heads’ 1983 classic album ‘Speaking In Tongues.’ The funky bass sound is deep and tight, and Chris Frantz’s drum, beautifully captured on this recording, sounds as real as can be. Obviously, you’d listen to opener Burning Down The House at a high volume, but you should also crank up the dial while listening to Girlfriend Is Better in order to hear how well the Eclipse Stereo can deliver the eclectic and varied synthesizer sounds on this track at any volume level you care to listen at. Listen, too, to how well the left and right channels are separated. Indeed channel separation is so complete that I could easily have been convinced that I was auditioning a pair of Eclipse Monos instead!

The Halcro Eclipse Stereo is not only the most recognisable amplifier in the world, along with being one of the most beautiful, but it is also the quietest and has the lowest distortion of all.

If you think that is part and parcel of what makes it one of the best-sounding amplifiers in the world, I’m not about to disagree. You may, however, be surprised to learn that the Eclipse Stereo is not one of the most expensive hi-fi amplifiers in the world. In fact, it’s not even close – dozens of its competitors have price tags in excess of $150,000!

In light of this information, you should realise that the Halcro Eclipse Stereo could be considered good value even at twice its price.

Link do recenzji: Halcro Eclipse Stereo – What Hi-Fi?

Link: Halcro Eclipse Stereo – SoundStage Australia – Product of teh Year 2021

Link: Halcro Eclipse Stereo – Hifi-Advice – Magnificent Masterpice Award

Link: Halcro Eclipse Stereo – Hi-Fi News – Outstanding Product