Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 800.2 Integrated Amplifier

Velvet Glove with massive iron hand control of any loudspeaker ... and beautiful VU meters ... Musical Fidelity, now owned by Pro-Ject’s Heinz Lichtenegger, has turned its attention to a Nuvistor tube-loaded integrated amplifier.

This new 800.2 is an upgraded take on the original 800 integrated, which was discontinued in 2021 due to parts shortages. This second iteration promises to be “beefier and better” than its predecessor with a new front panel display, larger/heavier (and rewound) power transformers plus revised power supply circuits.

Musical Fidelity also asserts that the new casework is “nearly immune” to external vibrations.

The 800.2 also inherits the locally decoupled output stage first seen in 2009’s TITAN. From the press release: “This meant giving each output device a correspondingly high current bulk supply capacitor. These capacitors mounted on the power amplifier PCB, give it a similar appearance to a “V10” engine!

Mounting such a capacitor near each output transistor allows more immediate access to stored energy, with a much lower impedance path to flow through. This results in better transient response and coincidently provides a degree of improved ripple filtering at higher currents in conjunction with the supply capacitors situated elsewhere.

The main supply capacitors are situated right on the rectifiers also decreasing supply impedance and helping to keep rectification and hum noise away from the high gain PA circuit.” With output devices numbering five per side, the net result is 330wpc into 8 Ohms, 500wpc into 4 Ohms and 1000wpc peak into 2 Ohms and a damping factor of 200.

There are four single-ended RCA inputs and one balanced XLR input as well as two sets of binding posts.