Cambridge Audio
Cambridge Audio is a British brand with a lot of heritage in the HiFi game. They come from, you guessed it, Cambridge, UK. At their core, Cambridge Audio is run by music-lovers. And you can tell that by just looking at their About Us section on their website. Here, you can get a feeling of the musical tastes of their team – including playlists!
Their beginning dates back to 1968, when a group of technology graduates established a RnD and prototyping business. In the same year, Cambridge Audio launched the P40 stereo amplifier. Over the years, Cambridge Audio has released many highly popular products.
One of their most profound products was the DAC Magic, which saw the light of day in 1995. It offered impressive performance at a very low price, making it the recipient of What HiFi’s Best Buy award in 1996.
After that, Cambridge Audio has released numerous popular products and series. Their Edge, Evo, CX and EX series enjoy high praise and popularity. I have recommended their amplifiers specifically to my friends in the past quite often.
Their product range goes from amplifiers, DACs, Streamers, Speakers all the way to even turntables and wireless headphones and earphones. Cambridge Audio covers it all, and everything at affordable price points. This makes Cambridge an excellent choice for anyone looking to dip their toes into the world of HiFi.
My very first Cambridge Audio product was a wireless speaker – the Go2. It has served me many years as my portable speaker on vacations or in parks during my time at the university. How time flies.
Earlier this year, we reviewed their EXA100 amplifier and EXN100 streaming DAC. Today, we check out the flagship level Edge W power amplifier.
Edge W
The Cambridge Audio Edge W is the company’s flagship stereo power amplifier, built around a minimalist signal path that contains only fourteen discrete components between the source and the loudspeakers, a design choice meant to keep the audio chain as transparent as possible.
Raw power is one of the Edge W’s defining traits: it delivers a continuous 100 watts RMS into an 8 ohm load and 200 watts RMS into a 4 ohm load, while drawing a maximum of one kilowatt under full power conditions and less than half a watt in standby mode. The amplifier uses Cambridge Audio’s proprietary Class XA topology that eliminates audible crossover distortion while maintaining high efficiency and low heat generation.
Complementing this architecture, a carefully regulated bias voltage system further suppresses distortion, contributing to an exceptionally low total harmonic distortion figure of less than 0.002 percent at 1 kHz into an 8 ohm load and remaining under 0.02 percent across the full 20 Hz 20 kHz audio band.
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