Halcro

Someone once said that there are many paths to the top of the mountain and this can certainly be applied to audio design. Some of the most acclaimed products are the result of years of dedication by a talented designer, taking trusted existing circuits and innovating, evolving, improving them to new levels of excellence. However, this is not always the case. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes into being from someone who is an expert in a completely different field and designs a product from a completely new perspective, not limited or shackled by traditional thinking.

There is no greater example of this than Halcro amplifiers from Australia. Bruce Candy is a renowned physicist and inventor who was an expert in the field of metal detection technologies. While operating his business Minelab Electronics, as a side project he designed an audio power supply and amplifier topology which all but eliminates distortion. Halcro was formed and stunned the world with their first amplifier which had distortion measured in parts per billion at full power! In late 2002, Stereophile’s cover article was on the Halcro’s dm58, boldly stating “The Best Amplifier Ever”. Numerous awards and ultra-positive reviews soon followed and Halcro grew into one of the world’s most respected hi-fi brands.

Halcro made a series of improvements to the dm58 over the years culminating in the dm88 mono blocks and the dm38 stereo amplifier. The family was joined by the dm8 and dm10 preamplifiers as well as a foray into home theatre with the stunning MC series of multichannel power amplifiers. Due to the machinations of changing ownership over the ensuing years, Halcro went into a brief hiatus before being ‘re-activated’ in recent years. Their return to the market has been celebrated by audiophiles around the world who remember the impact that Halcro had in the high-end market a few years ago.

The designs have been tweaked and improved in line with some modern technological developments and these changes although maintaining the advantages of the unique Halcro design, have made the amplifier even more emotionally compelling. Halcro is the epitome, the raw definition of musicality and purity. Eliminating distortion to this unprecedented level is part of the magic but not the whole story. There is a defining clarity to the music, even during the most harmonically complex pieces. Beneath the elegant shell of a Halcro amplifier lies a combination of revolutionary circuitry, meticulous attention to detail and plain common-sense thinking. Halcro’s proprietary circuitry configuration is such a lateral step, it is not recognizable as that of an amplifier to many engineers. In addition to the unique circuitry, the power supply and audio compartments are physically separated and heavily shielded to retain purity of the signal.

Bruce Candy’s genius design was so ahead of its time in the early 2000’s that it seemed as though Halcro was a gift from an advanced alien civilization, shocking listeners and redefining what was possible from an amplifier. Two decades later, we are fortunate to be able to access it again and you guessed it – it is still a revelatory experience. It shows you that in twenty years, amplifier design has still not caught up with what Halcro was doing back then. How lucky are we?