Here's Srajan Ebaen's answer in his Goldmund Telos 360 amp review a while back.
Conclusion. Responsible journalism can't skim over a basic fact.
Goldmund's Telos 360 are very expensive.
For that they're quite empty inside and materially of low weight. The very
smallest XA Series stereo amp from Pass Labs weighs more than this pair
combined but wants just 1/6th the coin.
Such a seriously loaded tab is part of the brand's luxury positioning. It comes
with the territory. Where material packaging goes, their own Job 250 monos sold
direct at $3'400/pr and manufactured in the same Geneva location show how a
very similar circuit with the same power output can be stuffed into far smaller
de-blinged boxes. Wherever ownership is invested in such matters, pride takes a
hit. With these luxe monos, there's only a reassuring cuddle and the obligatory
gleam of gold-plated decals and silkily finished nearly white aluminium to
confirm status. Whilst sensibilities on eye candy diverge, there's no argument
that these Swiss amps also deliver sonic substance. They aren't pushers of
empty calories. Yet they aren't kitchen pickers with big knickers either. The
overriding part of their design brief is speed, low noise and the resolution
which occurs at the confluence of these two streams. There's very refined
smoothness yet no comfort padding from fatty warmth.
With speakers whose warmth is
built in with strategic radiation patterns and minor response tweaks à la
Kaiser, the Telos 360 amps are truly ideal and ultimate
choices which prevent additive fattening, deceleration and coagulation. Hence
my earlier amp-as-passive-magnetive-preamp characterization. With speakers on
the cooler leaner side like our Albedos or equivalent efforts from Estelon,
Gauder/Isophon, Mårten & Co, arriving at a similar sound requires
adjustments with your upstream choices. Then a superior valve preamp and/or
tube-buffered DAC become natural options. Finally, I can think of precious few
if any amplifiers which could brag of an equivalent lineage or core circuit
tracking back unbroken 3+ decades. Over this period, the topology has undergone
constant refinements by different teams of engineers. Should this be the sonic
flavour of your dreams, here it's been tweaked, polished, re-tweaked and
polished again and again perhaps to a more extensive degree than anywhere else.
It's how Goldmund's commitment to tradition coexists with and informs their
commitment to evolution. For those of us insufficiently lubricated*, the Job amps
benefit from the exact same commitment. They're simply a few generations behind
this now 9th-gen curve. This rewards those who make a far greater
investment into the company with the very latest advances and findings. Which
is as it ought to be. Finally, the art of scaling up power without sacrificing
sophistication is trickier than doubling or quadrupling everything on a proven
low-power circuit. That's why to this day we don't have a 100wpc FirstWatt, a
200wpc Bakoon or 300-watt Crayon monos. That Goldmund have learnt how to scale
their circuit into high-power turf without sacrificing sophistication speaks to
the lengths their various project leaders have gone over the years; and how
management continues to invest into relevant R&D to make it so.