Operationally, the A1008 is a 'fit and forget' device... but it's a big fit and forget device: the main box is larger than most standard hi-fi tables.

Fortunately, it will sit on the top shelf of every regular stand. It runs mildly warm in use (power consumption maxes out at 700 watts, and runs 120 watts in idle/standby mode) but nothing like the Class A devices of old - the small, sweet sounding 25-watt A1 had a ribbed top-plate that could just about double up as a griddle.

Build quality is good, although not without its quibbles. In particular, the motorised central volume control did get raspy through the speakers as it moved through the higher regions of its travel. In fairness, this was hardly audible at volume levels that would make a whisper seem like a jet engine at full throttle, but volume pots tend to get more noisy, not less, with age.

The oft-used cliche of 'the mail'd fist in the velvet glove' takes on new meaning here. Musical Fidelity has managed to combine the grunt of a 250-watt beast with the gentle sweetness of a sensitive, 25-watt, Class A flower. The result is musical mastery.

There's an enormous temptation to get things totally wrong and hook this amp up to some inefficient, concrete-coned loudspeaker to see how the amp behaves - this is, at best, of academic interest for a reviewer, useless in reality.

Instead, go for an efficient loudspeaker of 90dB sensitivity and see how the speaker behaves with 250 watts gripping it by the cones. Now that's an interesting exercise.

Couple this amp to such speakers and you get near-infinite headroom and dynamic range, together with a curious smoothing out of some idiosyncrasies in the speaker itself. No, the A1008 is not capable of transforming the worst speakers into the best, but it does give a loudspeaker the chance of showing what it can do under 'ideal' conditions.

Naturally, the amplifier goes loud - loud enough to leave some speakers a smoking ruin. But that's missing the point. It doesn't go 'loud', it goes 'right' - you tend to use the A1008's volume control to adjust the level to get the correct volume for any given piece of music, not just to wick the sound up and down in some arbitrary fashion.

Once again, this comes down to near infinite headroom and dynamics. Freed from having to place limits on the volume ceiling, you set the volume level according to the scale of the piece of music, not the point where the amp or speaker starts to get out of control.

You don't cut back because the flutes distort, because the flutes aren't likely to distort. You don't hold off because the bass guitar gets out of control for the same reason.

This doesn't mean the amplifier is without a sound. Far from it. It sounds controlled, detailed and yet sort of chocolatey-rich. But these are the sort of attributes that do not make themselves directly apparent.

The amp doesn't shout its features at you, you just realise that you are listening further into the mix and you can understand an awful lot of what's going on in the inner structure of the music. The midband is particularly fine: sounds project into the room beautifully and the nature of those sounds is extraordinarily easy to listen to.

The words 'listener' and 'fatigue' simply do not exist side by side with this amp. No audiophile minute-long chunks of sound, here - you get the full cut, the whole symphony not just the key movement, and still come back hungry for more.