Constellation Inspiration: One of the very best integrateds I've ever heard
 

A Constellation Inspiration integrated amp arrived today from the friend that is very kindly loaning it to me. My understanding from him is it's brand new with zero hours on it.

Here's a quick piccie taken with the iPhone 12. Right now it's sitting on a rock maple board but once I finish up the CJ ART 150 amp review in the next day or so, I'll pull the First Sound preamp out of the main rack, and replace it with the Constellation Inspiration (then I can send the First Sound's dual external power supplies to Emmanuel for their CCI-X update. Woot! 👍 😀...but I digress).

https://photos.imageevent.com/puma_c...nspiration.jpg

After reading the manual, I connected my Lampi Baltic 3 DAC as source, fed by the Aurender N20 that's in for review.

First impression: very, very, very neutral and uncolored. Transparency and timbral resolution are pretty fab, as is the imaging. It's so clean and quiet it's kinda nuts. Zero hours on it, and just off the UPS truck, so it needs to settle and then rack up hours on the clock to open up to it's fullest extent. Stay tuned.

Nice! Subscribed:lurk:

Where is Constellation located?
Where are their products made?
These days, knowing this info is an important part of purchasing any product.

California according to web reports.

Constellation Audio was incorporated in the US in 2008 by David Payes and Murali Murugasu, also co-founders of the turntable maker Continuum from Australia.

Yep, they're based in Newbury Park, California.

I spent all last evening listening to the Constellation Inspiration One integrated.

As it is literally brand-new with zero hours of burn-in on the clock, and as it was just off the UPS truck and had virtually no time to settle, for the first hour it was very clean and quiet, but a bit "closed-in" sounding with respect to imaging.

Right off the bat, noise floor (quietness), transparency, and resolution are really excellent, and I expect will continue to get even better. Neutrality, resolution, and tonal accuracy are amongst the best I've ever heard.

Over the course of the evening, the Inspiration started to open up and "clear it's voice". The soundstage is larger, more spacious, extended and airy and the ability to render subtlety of timbre and texture will give you goose-pimples. As a result, the presentation is more defined, complex, and most importantly, nuanced.

As I'm literally finishing up writing the review of the ART150 amp today, this bad boy will be getting some serious hours on it to get it fully "on the cam" as we say in motor racing.

Go ahead, Constellation Inspiration...twist my arm. :music:

As Irv Gross told me, ".... all our products are proudly manufactured in California.", which is a good thing. :thumbsup:

Looking forward to your review.

That’s nice!!! What type of speakers do you think it would sound best with?

How’s the N20 eval going?

:lurk:

Any of them. Any speaker. At any load. Won't matter. It'll sound fabulous, regardless.

One of the hallmark traits of Constellation gear, I'm told from someone who owns a lot of Constellation gear, including the Argo integrated and Perseus/Virgo/Centaur separates that it is very stable and consistent driving virtually any loudspeaker impedance load.

I don't have extensive experience with integrateds, but its right up there with the best of the other integrated amps I have experience with, and that's DarTZeel and Viva. Both of those are sublime, and the Inspiration is right there with them.

And, my impressions have only gotten more positive over the last day or so; the Inspiration is continuing to burn in and become more spacious and open-sounding as well as increasingly layered and articulated in the presentation. It's still exceedingly neutral, but it has a naturalness and as Hans Beekhuizen says, "relaxed" quality to it that makes it very engaging to listen to.

I'm now considering how to scrape together the funds to buy one. The Inspiration is so quiet, so neutral, so uncolored, accurate, clean, defined, spacious, and refined-sounding with a solid and defined bottom-end that it would really make for an excellent "reviewing platform" for all other components. So far, it supports my hypothesis that it would be an outstanding "laboratory instrument" in that would provide a "reference standard" against which other system components could be most accurately reviewed, knowing the "amplification subsystem" is maximally quiet, accurate, neutral, dynamic, resolving, and transparent. Hope that makes sense...


Really well. It's next in the queue after I finish up the c-j ART 150 review this week.

It's one of the best designed, executed, and implemented and manufactured pieces of audio gear I have ever used. It's superbly made, incredibly easy to set up and get rolling, and easy to use. It's somewhat surprising in some sense that something that simply pulls files from an internal disk or an online streaming service and sends it to a DAC could have so much impact on the sound quality, but...it does. And...it sounds absolutely fantastic.

It's damn near perfect, and in my book, if it functioned as a Roon endpoint, it would be perfect.