Bryston BP20 / 3B ST

Bryston is one of those manufacturers that straddle the pro/domestic divide with ease, and apparently little in the way of compromise to either camp. Like any rack-mounted kit, the power amp looks a bit industrial, but its modest depth makes it quite lounge-friendly. The preamp is very smart and the controls very business-like. No studio power amp will get far with limited power, and the 3B-ST (the smallest in the range, mind) is rated at 120W per channel. In practice I got a comfortable 140W out of it and a rather scary 500W when running it as a bridged mono unit. It has unbalanced and balanced inputs, and output ter- minals that will accept two sets of cables if you want to do some bi-wiring. The preamp has eight line inputs (two of them balanced) and three outputs (one balanced) plus tape out. It also features switchable mono operation and polarity reversal, and a balance control, and employs relatively high- power output stages capable of delivering about half a watt — a few yards of cable will present it no problems at all. The pre- amps power supply is in an external box. Everything is very solidly constructed: Bryston offers a 20- year guarantee on its amplifiers, evidently no empty boast since the company has been around for nearly twice that long. From an engineering point of view these are very fine amplifiers, a fact confirmed by their almost unmeasurably good performance — for instance, the 3B-ST has a flat frequency response from practically DC to Radio 4 on Long Wave and exceptionally low distortion.

SOUND QUALITY

For all that, the Brystons wear their engineering lightly. Some studio amps of past decades were renowned for their ability to deliver vast power while leaving the listener musically unmoved. But your average studio owner is a lot more dis- cerning these days, and amps such as these have risen to the challenge with a clarity and subtlety which is fully at home in high resolution domestic hi-fl. With practically any music, there’s an air of quiet competence, a sort of ‘so when does it start to get difficult?’ attitude that certainly encourages the listener to play just one more track before bedtime. The key to this trick seems to be largely in the way the Bryston siblings combine a very even tonal balance with plen- ty of detail, from the quietest passages to the loudest. The delivery of detail, though, is so unassuming, self-effacing even, that one doesn’t always notice it consciously. What gives it away is when one suddenly starts humming along with an instrumental line that previously wasn’t even audible with most amplifiers. For instance, I happened to be editing a new recording while reviewing this group, so I listened to a few bits of it through each amp pairing. Only with the Bryston was I convinced that the pianist had actually played all the notes in a particularly dense and rapid passage. Clearly that kind of ability is as welcome in the home as it is in the studio. Also group-leading is the bass, which has effortless depth and copes equally with the quiet heartbeats at the start of Dark Side of the Moon and some of the more extrovert moments later in the same famous album.

CONCLUSION

It’s hard to identify limitations in these amps, and I had to haul out some much more expensive units for comparison to find any. They aren’t cheap, but for the performance they offer they aren’t expensive either, and can be warmly Recommended for pretty much any demanding application.

We invite you to experience the Bryston SST² Series amplifiers

20 Year Warranty - A Generation of Music