Quad Platina Review – Trusted Reviews

Price

The Quad is available in the UK for £3,500. It is sold through a significant spread of retailers and there is the option to buy it online should you choose to. In the USA, it can be had for $5,495. In Australia it costs $7,999 AUD.

The amp has launched at the same time as a matching streamer (the Platina Stream) and will be joined in time by a matching CD transport as well. If you like the look of the Platina Amo, you can have a whole stack of equally sleek looking devices to go with it.

Design

• Sleek, clean and modern…
• …and bigger than you think
• Excellent display and menu system
• No direct input selection though

The Platina is in direct contrast the Quad 3 I looked at recently. It looks absolutely up to date and it does so in an understated but very appealing way. Nothing about the Platina shouts at you to grab your attention but the more time you spend with it, the more it appeals.

The standard of build and finish is genuinely outstanding and it’s delivered in a way that is wonderfully understated. It’s a device that sits there being utterly and compellingly unobtrusive but you, the owner, the person who interacts with it, gets to remember how special it actually is.

It also looks modern but keeps some lovely little touches from previous Quad models. That long standby button is a nod to the 99 Series components that were produced at the turn of the century and other detailed aspects hark back to then as well. 

It’s cleverly done because if you don’t give a monkeys about any of this, it isn’t overt, just there if you know. One of the more surprising parts of the Platina is that it’s quite a bit larger than you might expect. It looks quite compact but it’s actually 445mm wide. Combined with the beefy 17 kilo weight, it’s a more imposing thing than the pictures might suggest.

At the front of the Platina, you’ll find a display and menu system. The interface that the Platina uses feels like a step forward over anything I’ve tested from IAG with a similar setup.

It’s slicker and more intuitive and it encourages you to adjust things to see what the effect they have. Such is the amount of things that the Platina does, it could have wound up feeling a bit daunting but the business of deciding how sensitive you want the digital inputs to be or whether you want to trim the level of different inputs so they have the same output volume can all be done very easily.

Not everything is quite so perfect though. As I shall cover, the Platina has plenty of inputs; ten of them in fact. These can be accessed by the remote control and front panel but they can’t be accessed directly. Depending on the connections you wind up using, you might find your inputs are an irritating distance apart on the cycle.

Specification

• 200 watts into 8 ohms
• Sophisticated digital board but no Bluetooth
• Balanced and unbalanced analogue connections
• Clever phono stage and potent headphone out.

Beneath the simple good looks of the Platina lurks a serious amplifier. How serious you ask? Well, it disposes of no less than 200 watts into 8 ohms which is a pretty serious number. This increases to 300 watts into 4 ohms and the circuit can deliver a peak current of 20 amps. In terms of old fashioned Class AB power, this is a lot.

There’s more to this amp than brute force too. It’s a dual mono configuration device built around a 630VA toroidal transformer that was specially designed for the Platina Integrated.

This combines a large filter capacity in the power supply (44,000uF per channel) with cascaded voltage regulators. In the output stage it has bespoke capacitors developed in collaboration with Wurth Elektronik. It’s also fully balanced from the front to the back, with Quad going to the effort of fitting a four channel rotary encoder for the volume as it simplifies the process of keeping the signal balanced throughout.

This balanced design is of more than abstract interest too. The digital input section of the Quad uses an ESS ES9038PRO DAC chip as the basis for this. This is an eight channel DAC, it is run in dual differential mode to try and eliminate errors that creep in (by checking the two streams against each other) and still allow for a balanced output to be sent to the preamp. When you consider the Platina’s specification it effectively means that every single digital input as a balanced source for that balanced amplifier.

There are two optical and two coaxial inputs supporting a USB audio input on a USB-C connection and an HDMI eARC input. Something that’s genuinely unusual is that there is both an optical and coaxial output on the back as as well. I genuinely cannot remember the last time I saw this so if you need such a thing, the Platina might suddenly shoot up your shortlist. 

The USB input can handle PCM to 768kHz and DSD512 with the other inputs topping out at 192kHz. Something that is mildly interesting is that Bluetooth is not present on the Platina which is logical to a point but I’m sure at least one would-be owner will miss it.

Something to bear in mind here is that, while this is a potent and capable piece of decoding hardware, it is not a self-contained solution. The Platina has no streaming module on board so, even though it can do the decoding, it still needs something to send it the signal in the first place.

I don’t doubt that the matching Platina Stream will be a superb device but at £3,000 it’s a pricey addition. Like the issue with Cambridge’s EXA and EXN100, the streamer feels over specc’d for a device partnering an amp with a digital board as good as this one but you are going to need something.

The analogue section of the Quad is usefully comprehensive too. A single XLR input is supported by a pair of RCA connections and there are matching XLR and RCA outputs that can be selected as pre-outs or tape loops depending on your requirements.

Don’t go thinking you’ll need to use one of these inputs for a phono stage either because the Platina has one and very comprehensive it is too. It’s a JFET (junction field-effect transistor) based phono stage that supports moving magnet and moving coil operation.

It can have its gain adjusted through three different settings, with impedance settings for moving magnet and moving coil models. Internal MC phono stages are rare things on integrated amplifiers and ones with adjustment are rarer still which puts the Platina in a very select group of devices. 

As a final extra ribbon to an already fairly enticing bow, the Quad has a dedicated headphone amp that outputs via a 6.35mm socket. It’s a slight shame you can’t have a balanced out too but this is realistically not the end of the world.

Performance

• Effortlessly powerful
• Genuinely superb bass
• Excellent levels of tonal realism from all inputs
• Phono stage performance is excellent
• Fine partner for TV work- once the CEC is switched on

Sometimes, we can get a bit lost in abstract power figures. It’s all very well me telling you that that the Quad spits out 200 watts and does so with next to no distortion but what does that mean in reality?

What it means is that the Quad can drive pretty much any speaker it’s likely to encounter to pretty much any level you fancy. You’ll need to be careful with the levels too. When we hear something as ‘loud’, a lot of those triggers are created by distortion.

As the Quad doesn’t do very much of that, you can sit there having a whale of a time and only realise quite how loud things are when someone comes in the room to sternly tell you quite how loud it is.

I’m not done there either. For most of the time testing the Platina, I have used a pair of Focal Kanta No1 standmount spekers. These are talented and exceptionally revealing; excellent for showing what an amp is doing right and wrong but they can often feel a little bit lacking in the bass department.

Run Leftfield’s wonderful Space Shanty through them with the Quad delivering the power and this perception rapidly vanishes. The Quad combines its power with superb current delivery to extract truly sensational low end from the Kanta No1.

It’s not simple brute force either. Listening to the stunning (if incredibly bleak) The Greener Pasture by Peter Oren sees the Quad deliver a superb performance. Oren’s deep, almost funereal vocals, have a richness and presence that grab and hold your attention.

The sparse instruments and guitar that supports him through the title track are completely convincing. The clever part of this for me is that trying to work out where the digital ends and the analogue begins is extremely tricky because it is so tonally even and cohesive.

Something else I’ve come to hugely admire about the Quad is that when you give it rather more rough and ready recording, there is enough overall forgiveness to ensure that you can continue to wind the level on and enjoy yourself.

You can listen to Placebo’s Meds, specifically the track Infra Red; a track almost broken by the amount of compression applied to it and the Platina manages to not only make it listenable but get to the actual (brilliant) musical core of things. If your collection includes some less than stellar recordings, this is an amp that should keep you listening to them.

The phono stage is very impressive too. While I don’t feel that ‘60dB’ on the Quad’s menu is quite the same as 60dB from the external phono stages here, when you combine it with that herculean power output, there is enough headroom.

It means that listening to the dense and atmospheric Electric War by Little Barrie is engaging and wholly convincing, unpicking the arrangements so you can follow them better without losing their character. So long as you don’t have a cartridge with really unusual impedance numbers, this is more than a convenience solution.

I’ve also really enjoyed using the Quad with my TV as well. So long as you have remembered that you need to switch the CEC function (that allows it to turn on and off with the screen) on manually, it’s a big, confident and effortless partner for whatever you choose to watch.

I ploughed through a couple of episodes of The X Files for nostalgia’s sake and was consistently impressed by how it fixed dialogue on screen while expanding effects beyond it. What is genuinely impressive about how this fits into the wider spec of the Quad. It feels like a natural extension of what the Platina is designed to do rather than a bolted on extra to tick a feature box on the website.

Should you buy it?