Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 600.2

INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER

- MARTIN COLLOMS

In 1991, when Heinz Lichtenegger founded Pro-Ject, part of the Audio Tuning group of companies, he went against the advancing digital onslaught, demonstrating absolute confidence in analog record players, which at the time were in steep decline.

He and his team made a remarkable success selling devices to play vinyl discs under the Pro-Ject brand and providing OEM product to other manufacturers. In the decades since, Pro-Ject has expanded to include a wide range of electronics, both digital and analog. One piece of Audio Tuning is Musical Fidelity, which was founded in the UK in 1982 by Anthony Michaelson. Michaelson sold Musical Fidelity to Audio Tuning in 2018, continuing with the company in “a design capacity.”

The very first Nu-Vista product was a preamp dubbed the Nu-Vista PRE. Launched in 1997, it was the second audio product to utilize nuvistors, small, metal-clad vacuum tubes introduced in 1959 to compete with bipolar-junction transistors after a Conrad-Johnson preamp 10 years earlier. The first power amplifier to utilize nuvistors was the ovoid Nu-Vista 300, reviewed in Stereophile by Michael Fremer in 1999."

The immediate progenitor of the weighty, powerful product under review was the Nu-Vista 800.2, which was reviewed by John Atkinson in December 2024. I reviewed the original Nu-Vista 800 about a decade earlier for HIFICRITIC; Michael Fremer reviewed it for Stereophile in 2015.