New from the British is the Azur 650R AVR from Cambridge Audio. Cambridge Audio began in 1968 and the company has been known for quality equipment. Somewhere in the late 1980s, Cambridge Audio become part of Audio Partnership. Usually when a company that is known for create high quality is bought up, they stop focusing on what they are doing well and spread themselves too thin. This is exactly what I was expecting.
I was initially impressed by the specs and build quality, so it surprised me when I didn’t keep that warm and fuzzy-logic feeling after I first set up the Azur 650R. In fact, I began to think that maybe Audio Partnership over engineered it.
Befitting its high-fidelity heritage, the Azur 650R AVR has the impressive Cirrus CS49700 audio-processing chipset with twin 32-bit DSP cores. In other words, it has serious processing power. It supports just about every audio codec known to man, including Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. It has a ginormous low-flux toroidal transformer, which helps it drive seven channels simultaneously at a specified 100 watts. (Two-channel mode is specified at 120 watts per channel.) It’s also one of the reasons why Cambridge Audio claims that the Azur 650R sounds like separates rather than an AVR—and why it also claims that it can handle virtually any impedance load.
A cool bi-amping mode lets you use the built-in surround back right and surround back left amplifiers in conjunction with the front left and right amplifiers to biamp the front main speakers in a 5.1-channel system. Some AVRs let you use those extra channels for a second zone, but the Azur 650R includes outputs for two more rooms of audio using amplified A-BUS keypads (plus composite video, if you run the extra cable) instead. I think that was a brilliant design choice.
If you are looking for quality sound, than this is definitely worthy of a listen.
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