Musical Fidelity NU-Vista 600.2

NU-Vista 600.2: listening

I listened to the Musical Fidelity NU-Vista 600.2 integrated amplifier pairing it with components we know well for being our longtime references. As digital source our ever-present Aqua La Scala MKII DAC in turn connected to a DIY Audio PC with JCat components on which runs Audiolinux in MPD/UPnP mode. To drive it I resorted to an iPad with the JPlay app installed of which you can find a comprehensive review in this article of mine. As speakers we used the Vivid Audio Kaya S12 and Kaya 90. The analog signal and power cabling, as well as the power supplies, were Neutral Cable Reference Series.
I begin by saying that, despite appearances, this 600.2 is a gentle soul, much more versed in introspection than in the display of brute force of which, moreover, it is not lacking. What is interesting is to reason about how this gentleness is expressed, and to do so we need to extrapolate some distinctive characters from it. One of these is the sense of cohesion that the 600.2 manages to instill in the reproduction. In contrast to some amplifiers that make analyticity their flagship, this Musical Fidelity seems to favor an approach devoted to the search for a sonic continuum. This is not to say that it cannot extract detail, far from it! It’s just that, having done so, it manages – I don’t know how – to achieve a skillful amalgamation that allows you to lose yourself in the music. I listened for a long time to a live recording at the Verbeier Festival of a string sextet (performers included L. Kavakos and L. Batiashvili), in a performance of P. I. Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence Op. 70, trying to focus on the part of a single instrument. This succeeded for a while but then I was seduced by the overall beauty of the sonic impasto of the six instruments and ended up listening to the whole and no longer just the detail.
Another interesting aspect is the low range, which has the peculiar ability to be fast and accurate but, where needed, also visceral. Here I experimented by listening to some tracks by Dream Theater and Liquid Tension Experiment (same drummer Mike Portnoy). The drum kit may not be among the best in terms of timbral accuracy, but its capacity for emotional involvement is second to none and it moved the four + four woofers of the Vivid Audio Kaya 90 in a seductive dance accompanied by the rhythmic movement of the VU Meters on the display. Moreover, in that context I also appreciated another peculiarity of this integrated amplifier, namely the excellent overall timing that is expressed in lightning-fast transients and credible releases free of unnatural tails. Even brought to expression at condominium lite sound pressure levels, one always gets the feeling that the Musical Fidelity NU-Vista 600.2 is going souplesse without exerting any effort whatsoever . Which allows me to link back to what I wrote at the beginning of the article, namely that the power output, although lower than that of its big brother 800.2, is probably sufficient for most people who live in normal-sized homes, have normally efficient speakers and listen at normal pressures.

What about the valves? Can you hear the tubes? At first listening and not knowing that there is a NuVistori Class A preamplifier section on board, one might be tempted to consider the NU-Vista 600.2 a very good Solid Stage amplifier, but then listening to voices, male or female makes no difference, one realizes that there is something, a flicker, a warmth, a something of humanity that makes you mentally reconnect to the sounds of a vacuum tube.
One last one thought concerns spatiality: the Musical Fidelity NU-Vista 600.2 is capable of building very wide spaces on the three axes and does so with great mastery in depth scanning and focus. Some flaws, wanting to look for the proverbial hair in the egg, I could find in the tendency to a certain approximation in the harmonics of acoustic instruments, such as violins or pianos, but also in certain acoustic guitar recordings where the instrument sounds slightly different and less articulated than in my references which, however, I must state for intellectual honesty, are much more demanding from an economic point of view.