Plinius 8200 or Sim I5?


I'm changing my bedroom system. I want to swap out my amp and pre-amp and go with a good integrated that would work well with my Dynaudio 1.3 SE speakers. I've read the forums and the Plinius 8200 and Sim Audio I5 have been repeatedly mentioned as mating well with Dyns. Between these two which would you choose and why?

I cannot audition either. Taking into account that Dyns like a lot of high quality power it would appear that the 8200, 175 watts versus 75 watts for the I5, would be superior. What do you think?

Thanks
lrm1jaf

Showing 1 response by achou

I haven't heard the Dyns before, but I have heard the Simaudio I5 (with Simaudio Nova and both JMLabs and Paradigm 100v2 speakers) and the Plinius 9200 (with MF Tri-Vista cd and Sonus Faber speakers).

The Plinius had very deep extended bass which sounded over-pronounced and unnatural to my ears. It also managed to muddy all of the mid-range details in orchestral music. But it was very powerful.

The I5's bass does not extend very far, but it is very fast and well-controlled. This lack of bass extension may not be important for your bookshelf speakers. It has extremely good imaging, and it is very resolving. After I put the I5 in my system, I had to put a isolation transformer on my cd player to get rid of high frequency hash that was not audible with my old amplifier. Now I can hear background details like the air conditioning system purring and clicking on 'Mining for Gold' on the Cowboy Junkies 'Trinity Sessions' album. On the 'Misguided Angel' track, I noticed for the first time that there are male backing vocals on the chorus.