Rotel currently offers a range of amplifiers and receivers to suit most hi-fi and home cinema applications, plus audio source components and DVD players. It has an admirable habit of not fiddling unnecessarily with good products, but every now and then new models come along and the RA-06 is one of those - in fact, there's a whole 06 series of recently-launched hi-fi separates.
Externally it's familiar Rotel stuff, with a smart rather than beautiful front panel fronting a slimline case. The line-up of five line inputs with an additional moving-magnet phono stage is also unsurprising, though one of the inputs appears on the front panel as a 'media player' mini-jack socket.
In its promotional material, Rotel makes much of its 'Balanced Design Concept', by which it evidently means attention to detail. Of course, most manufacturers claim as much but there's plenty of evidence here that Rotel's boast is not empty.
Looking inside the unit, we were impressed by the percentage of really good quality electronic components, such as close-tolerance, low-noise resistors and polypropylene film capacitors, the sort of stuff normally found in more high-end equipment.
Not everything is quite so fancy, but the power supply uses a fair-size toroidal transformer and the output stage is generously equipped with doubled pairs of transistors. The rating of 70 watts per channel is around average these days for a mid-price integrated and will drive most speakers to more than satisfactory levels.
If there's one thing that stands out from our listeners' notes on this amplifier, it's that the sound is generalised and lacking in refinement. It seems to be good at lots of things but very good at few. The best feature is probably rhythm and pace, which attracted consistently favourable comment and gives an appealingly funky character to any music with a strong rhythmic underlay.
Total control
We wouldn't dream of demanding total control from an amplifier at this sort of price, but others in this group achieve a better approximation to 'grip' than the Rotel. Bass is extended but lacks real precision and so varies considerably from one track to the next.
Synthesised deep bass sounds are probably best served, but jazz-style plucked upright bass proves a tricky problem with a 'woofy' quality to it. In busy tracks, bass seems to recede somewhat, a characteristic our panel found most apparent in the Michael Jackson excerpt.
