Colloms Sound Quality Archive: Comparative sound quality ratings for power amplifiers, preamplifiers, CD players, and for integrated amplifiers. HIFICRITIC has incorporated this sound quality rating archive.

About Colloms subjective sound quality scaling:
These are mainly used for audio electronics. Some 25 years ago I adopted an IEC based scale from 0 to 10 where zero represented nil fidelity, 10 was assigned to essentially perfect reproduction, and given a sufficiently large and representative group of products, a score of 5 became the group average for sound quality. Such results were self limiting and self sufficient for each group test. Maintaining a historic standard based on such results has proved difficult as equipment continued to improve and the resulting scores edged inexorably higher towards 8 and 9. The need to differentiate degrees of excellence demanded increasingly finer resolution as this scale was logarithmically crushed towards that pre-chosen limit of perfection, namely 10. I solved this problem by removing the barrier represented by ?scale 10?, decided that my numeric scores should rise in proportion to the gauged linear improvement over previous references, many of which are maintained in my own equipment store. These references help immensely in achieving a measure of long term consistency.

Historically, low grade, marginal quality integrated amplifiers score as they always did, at the 5 to 6 point level, while worthy hi fi alternatives attain 12 to 18. Meritorious power amplifiers lie in the 18 to 28 range, while top of the line references have reached 40 points or more. Subjectively, weighing all the subjective parameters, including ?involvement?, i.e. the ability to hold the listeners attention, a 40 is expected to be subjectively 'twice as good' as a 20. Appreciating sound quality at these higher levels requires a commensurate performance from all other elements in the chain that is used to evaluate the products.

A further decade of commercial endeavour has taken the scoring to a present maximum over 150. Nevertheless a superb score such as this cannot full account for individual taste and how good a match might be achieved with a given partnering system. Thus the intending purchaser's own discretion, judgment and experience will still be required to make sense of these sound quality scores.

A number of historic and interesting products are included in the listing for reference purposes. Please also see our ratings explained page to find out more about Colloms Sound Quality ratings.