I'm trying Shanling SP-80 monoblocs at home...

The matching CD player had a double box, but this one is triple--ten flaps to open before you come to the treasures. The packing is really very good, the foam is high-quality, reusable many times. One of the two boxes is labeled “fittings included.” The fittings in question are the remote control, a soft chamois leather for wiping all the polished metal, and the manual, because the other box has its own set of the other “fittings”: a pair of white cotton gloves, a premium power cord and a pair of Shanling-labeled EL34 output tubes.

Lift off the block containing the fittings and you see the amp in its plastic bag. There is a strong smell of aromatic hydrocarbons, or anodizing bath, or something, when you open the bag. The amp is absolutely gorgeous, pictures no more do it justice than they did the CD-T100 player, but that factory smell is awfully strong; it lasts several hours. The output tubes fit nicely into the ceramic sockets, but the amp doesn’t fit my 5-shelf Target rack very well. It’s too deep. Half of each foot, front and rear, sticks out fore and aft. And unfortunately, I have to put the amps on a lower shelf, where they can’t really be seen. This is almost an affront, because with their gold, chrome, stainless and anodized aluminum. and the circular readout windows, they are absolutely meant to be drooled over. You can wipe them off with the chamois.

The power cords fit well and my Ensemble Masterflux interconnect cables reach all the way to the amps’ front right sides and plug in nicely. The output terminals accept my Ensemble Voiceflux’ Cardas spades. The terminals themselves look a good deal like 5-way WBTs but are labeled Shanling. A final cable with stereo minijack connectors connects the amps at the back next to a toggle switch. One of these switches goes up, the other down. The amp with the switch up becomes the control unit, and the other’s volume level is slaved to it. You point the remote at the master to control both amps. When I switch on the slave the display obsequiously reads “SlaveWait.” As soon as I switch on the master amp the readout switches to a twin of the other.

After twenty minutes’ warmup, initial listening impressions are good, but my older teenager feels the previous amp, a solid-state Sim Celeste W-4070se, sounded better. This may actually be a good sign, because this particular son disagrees with everything on simple principle. But a proper evaluation of the amps’ qualities, and a review, will need to wait until the break-in period seems to be over. The CD-T100 player needed 100 hours to break in, and continued to improve after that. I hope the SP-80’s don’t take that long!