Do you know what it means to miss a great amp? 

The boys from Virginia know what they're doing. For many years, Conrad-Johnson tube amplifiers and preamplifiers have stood side by side with the best of the best in high-end audio. A few years ago Lew Johnson and Bill Conrad made a shrewd business decision. They bought the eminently respected (and perennially under-priced) McCormack Audio product line and, with it, they brought electronics designer Steve McCormack on board at C-J. The affiliation has been a welcome expansion for an already well-regarded, award-winning company.

McCormack of Virginia is now a division of Conrad-Johnson enterprises. With the most recent iteration of McCormack amplifiers—always audiophile bargains from the outset—the imbrication of Conrad-Johnson with McCormack Audio achieves the equivalent of touchdowns scored on both sides of the gridiron simultaneously.

Follow the not-so-obvious bouncing pigskin. Conrad-Johnson continues to be a tube-lover's notion of heaven. I have written elsewhere at length about Conrad-Johnson amplifiers. Even their "entry level" (or least expensive) integrated units carry a seductiveness that charms all but the most unregenerate anti-tube audiophile. The Conrad-Johnson "sound" is large on musical engagement; short on hype and marketing overstatements. The fellows hard at work in Virginia let their work speak for itself. It's hard not to respect that self-confidence and good taste.

With the addition of Steve McCormack's quite literally brilliant design craftsmanship, C-J has shown itself to be a forward-thinking company that refuses to let the market's whims define its outlook. Bill Conrad and Lew Johnson will tell you, in different voices and terms, how much they think of McCormack's artistic electronic wizardry, but they speak forcefully of maintaining steady focus on the singular value that founded Conrad-Johnson: "stunning sound."

Stunning sound, unwavering commitment to the thrill of the listening experience, has driven the Johnson and Conrad partnership from the beginning. With the acquisition of McCormack Audio, the elaboration of that audio outlook and design vision deepened considerably. In terms of Wall Street's sometimes skewed (sometimes accurate) evaluation ratios, C-J may well be a vastly undervalued audio corporation.

I've heard no stirrings in the Virginia hills toward a corporate coup or insider take-over, but the truth of the audio industry (as we now witness it) is the depreciation of many strong businesses by a general market in decline, retrenchment, or retreat. The Conrad-Johnson story is an example of steady stewardship under duress. That's why the gaggle of long touchdown runs to the east end zone have been able to rack up big numbers. Lew and Bill play smash-mouth football. They recruit beefy offensive tackles and run the gut-series over them. Score it 28 to zip for Lew and Bill.

At the same time, without contradiction, the west end zone is under full assault by the bruising ground game of Steve McCormack's solid-state amplifier designs, grinding out yards in large chunks. A digression on the McCormack MAP-1 preamp, and on the emerging McCormack universal transport, would show the diversity of attack . . . razzle-dazzle audio equivalents of the old Don Coryell west coast let-it-all-hang-out "bombs away" offense. The unit under surveillance here is the outrageously authoritative McCormack DNA-500 amplifier. This is no three- yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust cross-buck dive into your next sound system. This amp eats turf like Popeye swilling spinach. Call it the amp that breaks your deaf neighbor's newly aroused audio heart. Call it the last amp you may ever want to own. Call it the "Air Coryell" bombardier amplifier . . . call it what you want, but take a listen. It ain't ordinary.

How many of us who care deeply for music search in vain for an amplifier that gives us continual enjoyment and repeated musical relaxation? I'd guess somewhere in the vicinity of seventy or eighty per cent. One does not mind the search, but the vanity, the coming up short (or empty) is the hard part.

There must be an amplifier out there somewhere, one muses, that has my name on it . . . an amp that purrs when I want the lithesome lilt of harmonic sweetness and roars when the slam of symphonic bombast ought to own my world. You know there's got to be such a fine, cooperative amplification powerhouse with just the right balance of delicacy and intensity, whisper-soft surprises and diamond-hard bravura. Got to be.

Of the dozens upon dozens of amps I've spent time auditioning, a few stand out. One buys a few and swallows the temporary or more permanent consequences of the choices. Some remain to cheer another day. I have an old Audio Research tube amp, a D-76A, greatly modified by DeHong Seeto, before he left Stereo Exchange in New York and went to Jadis. It never fails to enchant me after long periods of non-use. Anytime I reintroduce that wildly glowing box into a sound system, I sit a spell and soak up exotic sounds that have no names but own my heart awhile.

I routinely employ a McCormack DNA-125 amp in my review work. It has been highly-rev'd (customized by Maestro McCormack his own self) . . . and it is a rock-solid companion in my audio world. I also use a massively-revised DNA 0.5 amp with an utterly beguiling musical precision that's quite difficult to define, but that never fails to womp my butt into a seat with my ears cocked straight ahead. The arrival of an amplifier—the DNA 500—that Herr Doktor McCormack refers to as his "statement" product to date comes with a certain cachet, anticipation mixed with tweaked curiosity.

Here's the deal. I gave this very heavy, physically impressive amplifier many days of gentle (and not so tender) break in. I ran it at a variety of speakers with loads that pretty much define the spectrum at work in most home and studio set ups. I compared this gigantic amplifier with my not-at-all-inconsiderable DNA-125 and the DNA-0.5 amps and found, no surprise, great similarity in sonic texture, rhythmic pace, dynamic slam and relaxation, soundstage footprint, ease of authority, and sheer musicality. The DNA-500 is clearly an evolved, advanced iteration of Steve McCormack's DNA (distributed-node amplification) design vision. It is an enormous step toward an audio horizon that I, personally, have seldom (perhaps never) approached. If I had to choose a single term to define the essential sonic attribute of the DNA-500 it would be AUTHORITY.

But one word is not adequate. No easy summation is possible for this truly soul-thumping, mind-stopping amp. It is almost not in the generic category, "audio amplifier," in any way that accurately indicates its unconventionally sophisticated weave of detailed (delicate, nuanced, altogether gorgeous) musical properties and sonic command.

Perhaps the first quality that captures your focused attention, on sustained listening, is its command. No speaker load, no front-end set up, no musical or sonic demand confuses its amassed ability to bring every element of the audio chain—each piece of gear; any choice of cabling, preamp, speaker, or musical selection—into peaceful, relaxed grandeur. Even a solo voice takes on greater "convincingness" . . . an awkward term that struggles, on purpose, to suggest the haptic, physical, human, minutely-textured sonic quality of music gently handed forwarded like caviar on fine china.

Undismissable authority. That is the most immediately evident musical declaration in the DNA-500s audio profile. Sonic and musical authority. Once you've gotten past the sheer weight and force and ease of music so effortlessly rendered, you begin to notice that there's more "there" in each instant of well-known pieces you love and rely on for reckoning and enjoyment. More transient decay. Just right. More interior information (studio sound stage; concert hall stage; instrumental and vocal eccentricities). More exquisite sense of textures—of space itself and of each tonal and physical element that makes up well-reproduced sound and music. I found myself able to identify, precisely and quickly, brands of microphones used to record individual voices and/or instruments. The DNA-500, in sum, opened the invisible "front" of my sonic vantage point. I looked inside the musical event with greater ease and scope than I've ever—I mean EVER—enjoyed or endured.

It's rather strange to say that an amplifier produces sound with a revelational quality "like a powerful flashlight" . . . but that's what I experienced. It is spooky and intriguing at once. In fact, for someone who records music, such an experience is utterly enchanting and unswervingly attractive. I felt over and over as if I was peering into a private, otherwise unreachable domain of information, both sonic and human. The capacity of this amp to take you far into the music, and further yet, is difficult to describe. Listening to recordings that I know extremely well, I found myself confronted on more than a few occasions by a humbling, eerily nameless sonic experience. I found myself presented with an unmeasurable, improbable, flat-out dubious realm of "musical spirituality": a sense of the weight of consciousness or dignity that resides within an instrument, a voice, a performer, an event. When I think of the most awe-inducing moments of musical witness I've had—an occasion, for instance, with Sandor Salgo's fifty-member choir in Monterey, California, thirty years ago, singing Bach cantatas in a small Spanish church—I recall the extreme sense of human transcendence at once incarnated and liberated there. Such moments define the limits of expression. These momentary self-representational declarations of an essential in-born spirit or meaning, here voiced IN music, AS music, offered by this special amplifier . . . leave me damn near speechless. I was not imbibing funny substances as I did my work. The sense of musical and human intimacy possible with this amplifier is startling and can be uncomfortable if you're not prepared to deal with it.

Such experiences, I'm well aware, are not ordinary. I've frequently had such intimate musical experiences while recording direct to two-track from live microphone feeds. It is possible, in such circumstances, to be closer to the music than even the performers are themselves, since each of them is placed within his or her lyrical and acoustic space. The one who sits within the convergence of individual notes and tones and phrases—at the center of separate musical realities washing or splashing together, as water joins and scatters in a waterfall—occupies a brilliant, awesome seat . . . and that sense of being-at-the-heart-of-things-musical (things in motion, music "being made now") is exactly what I heard in several modes of clarity and intimacy with this extraordinary amplifier.

Here are the bare-bones listening operations. They do not define the strength and beauty of this capable sound machine. They tell you what challenges I threw at the DNA-500. That's all.

In a head-to-head shoot out with a large Classé amp, no contest. Walk away. Try something else. Up against the DNA-500, the otherwise lovely Rotel RB-991 offered no challenge. No resistance, not close. Silly idea. Directly one on one, immediately proximate, the big McCormack looked a Krell FPB-600 behemoth (at 1,200w/ch @ 4 ohms) smack in the eye and held its ground as if to slowly eliminate any shared turf between them. The DNA-500 (see specs) revealed greater transient delicacy, more stunning sonic authority, and finer musical seductiveness (of every kind) by a considerable margin. There was no contest at all; not even "sort of."

Surging on several days later, in a direct comparison with the genuinely engaging Moon W-5 amplifier (380w/ch @ 4 ohms), the DNA-500 revealed a more bewitching, more transparent, and startlingly seductive musicality. It prevailed, as well, in the extra-dimensional quality of emotional involvement. The Moon W-5 is a very good amplifier.

Finally, in a side-by-side musical give-and-take with the terrific GamuT D200 (at 400w/ch @ 4 ohms)—an amplifier that deserves serious consideration for many reasons, including its magnificently fragile nuances—the DNA-500's power (900w/ch @ 4 ohms) appeared at once innocent and evil: excruciatingly convincing in the delivery of powerful musical passages as if nothing—literally nothing remotely possible—could interfere with its firestorms of sonic thunder rendered passionately and sweetly precise.

The GamuT is a lovely musical machine. I very much like and respect it. In fact, I'm certain I'd be pleased to listen to it for long stretches. But the DNA-500 matched its loveliness and soared into its own universe of unusually tactical lyric resonance. The bewitching innocence of the DNA-500's command derives from an authoritative sense of endless effortlessness; its evil resides with the shock of sonic calm and force that it places before, and all around, a stunned listener who (in this instance) thought he'd already heard everything his Apogee Stage system could deliver.

There was no contest anywhere here. The amplifier racked up points like a bored man playing solitaire. Score four touchdowns for Steve McCormack.

Concluding/Seeking Much-Wanted Further Inspections:

Conrad-Johnson's new solid-state amplifier champ is bi-coastal, ambidextrous, and stereophonically capable of tossing bombs from either end of the field for touchdowns in each direction. The musical equivalent of Air Coryell is alive and healthy. This conceit is no idle simile. One thing is clear. The boys in Virginia are winners with this box among their ample line-up of world-class gear. Maestro McCormack wins, no less. The real victors are those who take sound and its infinitesimal vibrations seriously enough to hear the whole Zen of it alongside (and through, within) micro-elements that make music magic, at its best.

The score is tied. No stalemate. Lew Johnson, Bill Conrad, and Steve McCormack have conspired to produce an amplifier the equal of any I've heard, in fact superior to any I can name right now. When I can pop for an autographed version of the DNA-500 as a permanent resident in my main listening rig, it will be on its way to Chez BluePort. In the meantime, I suffer the somewhat odd experience of, viscerally, not wanting to let this gentle giant drift out of reach. Now and then a piece of gear makes itself indispensable. Not often, but occasionally. The McCormack DNA-500 has done that.

A last thought: mere speculation. Matched with the right speakers in the right room, the DNA-500 may be that rare device capable of creating a convincing illusion of surround sound from one amplifier and one pair of accurate transducers. The next time I spend prolonged time with it, I'll find out.

DNA-500 and other McCormack Products Available at

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