LTA Z40+ Integrated Amplifier

Maybe the best integrated amplifier I’ve ever had in my room…Yeah, I think it is the best.

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The LTA Z40+ is a wonderfully appealing package in every way a piece of audio gear should be. It is beautifully designed, a pleasure to use, built around truly original thinking with a decades-long history of David Berning delivering the sonic goods, while offering musical performance that is seamless, rich, and endlessly rewarding.

Resolution-wise, it’s as real as it gets. You could gauge the physical dimensions of the performer. Chest, throat, height, everything. It’s cliche to say, but you get the speed, clarity, and grip of solid-state…and the intimacy of tubes. The music isn’t in your face but more relaxed and smooth.

It has the cleanest sound I’ve ever heard from an integrated amplifier. There’s no exaggeration and you’re not going to be missing anything in the mix. If you upscale your music, you’re going to hear exactly how it was scaled. The Z40 is able to isolate and articulate complex harmonics with ease and confidence.

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LTA produces amplification for home use that pushes the boundaries of what transformer-less circuits are capable of. Their products deserve to be appreciated for their intrinsic qualities and not because they should appeal both to both tube and solid-state aficionados. They deserve to be appreciated in their own right by anyone looking to put together a home audio system that is true to the music, persuasively presents music of all types, hypes nothing while shining a positive light on it all. That's all the reason anyone who cares about music and its production through an audio system needs to realize that the Z40 integrated is special.

If you are putting a system together with the expectation that it will serve you well for a long time and across all kinds of music, then the Linear Tube Audio Z40 integrated amplifier is one of only a handful of amplifiers or integrated amplifiers you really must audition.

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That Berning-designed power supply was seriously quiet. It wasn’t until I put my ear right up to the soft-dome tweeter of one of the Dynaudios that I heard the slightest bit of noise. When I began streaming music, my first impression was that I was listening to a high-end solid-state amp. The sound was clean, clear, and thoroughly articulate. I would never have guessed that there was a tubed power amplifier -- let alone a tubed preamplifier -- in the signal chain. Fascinating.

Linear Tube Audio’s Z40 tubed integrated is one of the coolest integrated amplifiers I’ve reviewed. Its ZOTL architecture paid real sonic dividends -- the sound was tonally neutral, linear at the extreme high and low ends of the audioband, and boasted a holographic midrange for which some audiophiles search decades without ever finding. Within its modest power envelope it did everything well, and was downright sensational with human voices and intimate instrumental music. The Z40 will no doubt work in a variety of systems and settings. But give it the right partnering loudspeakers and this amp won’t merely play music -- it will sing. That is most uncommon.

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I actually had a three-amp shootout.

- PS Audio BHK - Preamp + 250 Amp — $10.4k and 114 lbs
- PrimaLuna EVO 400 Integrated — $5.6k and 68 lbs
- LTA Z40+ Integrated

To my ears, in my room, with Tannoy Cheviots, after listening for a week, the EVO finished a distant 3rd. The Z40+ — surprisingly, to me — matched the PSAudio. But there was a little extra magic in the midrange and dynamics [with the Z40]. Hard to put my finger on it, but it’s like this amp was designed specifically for live/acoustical music.