PrimaLuna EVO 400

INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER

- ROGIER VAN BAKEL

National pride is the damnedest thing. When I was growing up in the Netherlands, schoolchildren were taught that the inventor of the printing press was a Dutchman named Laurens Janszoon Coster. Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg was waved away as an also-ran, if he was mentioned at all.

Since then, the Dutch have claimed other engineering and technology triumphs that aren’t quite so dicey. Take the world of audio. Dutch innovators at Philips gave us the audio cassette (for which I beg your forgiveness). Two decades later, they and their Sony colleagues upped the game with the Compact Disc—and randomly decided on the diameter of the center hole by making it exactly the size of the pre-Euro Dutch dime. A Dutchman came up with Bluetooth. Top high-end brands like Mola Mola and Hypex hail from the Netherlands.1

So does PrimaLuna. For almost 20 years, the company has built a solid reputation making high-quality tube gear—that still offers remarkable value, even after the price of its cheapest products rose from $1095 in 2003 to $2795.

I own the PrimaLuna DiaLogue Premium HP power amplifier. It’s superb. So I didn’t need much convincing when Stereophile Editor Jim Austin tasked me with reviewing the company’s top-of-the-line integrated tube amplifier, the EVO 400. After it spent almost three months in my system, I can safely say that in contrast to the story about Mr. Coster and the printing press, there’s nothing hyped or sus about the praise this product has received.

SPECIFICATIONS