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Listening Room
Vecteur AV-6
Multichannel Amp
Sure, you can set up a home
theatre (or audio surround)
system by buying the best
amplifiers and stacking them up
to the ceiling. And perhaps they’ll even
survive the heat buildup. Then again,
it’s much easier to buy a single chassis
with all the power amplification you’ll
ever need. Too bad multichannel amps
are such lousy compromises.
But they don’t have to be.
The AV-6 is large and heavy, though
it is neither one if you consider that it
contains no fewer than six channels. And
they’re not channels that are intended
for listening at a whisper, either. The
advertised power is 120 watts per channel,
enough to feed a substantial home
theatre system in a large room. Of
course, with the advent of music surround
systems, such as that of SACD,
an amplifier like this has non-video uses
as well. It may even be an interesting
choice for two-channel use, a possibility
we’ll get to shortly.
As you’d expect, there’s not much
to the front panel: just the on-standby
button and a small pilot light. The rear
50 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
is all business as well, with a good quality
jack and proper binding posts for each of
the six channels. The removable power
cord is billed as audiophile quality,
though it appears to be the usual molded
cord with a better quality AC plug. Well,
that’s better than nothing.
The AV-6 has two power supplies,
each with its own massive toroidal
transformer, as you’ll see from the
picture on the next page. The configuration
explains the unusual choice of six
channels — with two power supplies, the
good balance can be maintained only if
the number of channels is even divisible
by two. Each power supply, then, handles
three channels. Unlike some multichannel
amps, the AV-6 is not modular, and
Six channels on a
very heavy chassis.
Is it as good as the
other amps of the
marque?
you can’t add or subtract sections, nor
are other versions available.
The top, which also covers the sides
of the amplifier, is heavily coated on both
sides by what appears to be a bituminous
material, with the result that you can’t
make it ring no matter how hard you
hit it. Though we often see covers with
damping pads glued to the inside, we
don’t recall ever seeing quite this level
of damping before. Does it matter? Well,
if you believe that any electrical circuit
can act like a microphone (and we do, for
reasons you’ll understand in a moment),
this is a nice thing to see.
We believe that an AV amplifier is
competent only if it can hold its own
in a music system. For that reason, we
held our listening session in the Alpha
room, using just two of the Vecteur’s six
channels. We selected channels 3 and 4,
because those two are fed by different
power supplies. We broke out a set of
favorite LPs, and challenged the Vecteur
AV-6 to show us what it could do.
It showed us right from the first notes
on the first recording, Façade (Reference
Recordings RR-16 or RR-2102CD). Our