THRESHOLD – SA12

The Stasis SA/12es appeared even larger when moved from LA’s wide-open spaces to the more typical 15′ by 20′ (Stereophile) listening room that DO and I currently share. Placing them between the loudspeakers—the only practical location—made me feel as if I were in a CES exhibit. I felt like putting out brochures and brewing coffee. I had to turn the SA/12es sideways to allow room for DO to set up other amplifiers for his listening sessions, obscuring Threshold’s striking front-panel cosmetics but providing easy access to the rear input and output terminals. No one ever claimed high-end audio was easy.


The power supply of the SA/12e consists of twin 1200VA toroidal transformers (with a short-term capability of twice that value) and 250,000µF of total filter capacitance. You can get some feeling for the sheer size of this power supply from the caution in the owner’s manual to position “hum-sensitive” equipment at least 18″ away to guard against possible noise generation. The quality of the supply is also indicated, perhaps surprisingly, by Threshold’s 0dB dynamic-headroom rating for the amplifier. They argue that headroom specs provide a measure of the difference between an amplifier’s continuous and short-term capabilities. That distinction blurs in an amplifier such as this, with its extremely rugged, stiff power supply. And in an amplifier this powerful, who’s concerned about “dynamic headroom” anyway? One could argue, with some justification, that this is, again, “overkill,” that music is a dynamic phenomenon in any event, and that a less “brute-force” approach is perfectly adequate. Threshold clearly is not shooting here at a target of “perfectly adequate.”