THRESHOLD-T200

Except for the binding posts, which appear to be your standard-issue plastic-knob variety, the T-200 has the quality look and feel of a true high-end amplifier. Fit and finish are excellent, and the 5/8″-thick faceplate sports sculpted handles. Inputs are switch-selectable between unbalanced RCA and balanced XLR. Another switch (safety-locked) selects between stereo and mono operation. Rated at 100Wpc into 8 ohms, the T-200 can be bridged for mono operation, in which case it puts out 350W into 8 ohms. Although the amp is quite heavy, the front and rear handles make it easy to move around. The T-200’s four non-spiked feet didn’t provide enough clearance for heat dissipation when the amp was placed directly on the thick carpet of my listening room, so I put a large butcher-block type cutting board on the carpet, and placed the amp on the cutting board. This allowed for the requisite ventilation (the T-200, as a class-A design, runs quite warm), and for reasonably firm support. The T-200 is the second from the top in a new line of four amplifiers whose claim to design fame is the use of a device called the Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT). As I understand it, the IGBT—also used in the Forté 4A and by Counterpoint in some of their Natural Progression amplifiers—is a sort of hybrid between the conventional bipolar transistor and the MOSFET. Like the bipolar transistor, it has a high-current, low-impedance output, and a high input impedance like the MOSFET. The IGBT device is also said to have ten times the MOSFET’s forward-transfer admittance, which sounds like it’s a good thing to have. (The result, sez Threshold, is lower crossover distortion, which is a good thing to have.)