The HiFi Rose RA180 is a reference-grade integrated amplifier with 800 watts of Class D amplification that will pair with any of the HiFi Rose DAC/streamers in this lineup. It has a similar high-purity aluminum silver finish as HiFi Rose’s top-of-the-line DAC/streamers. However, the RA180 uses a next-gen advanced Class D design developed in-house to take the acoustic performance of traditional Class D amps to a higher level.

Class D has a higher efficiency, and output with lower noise and ultra-low distortion compared to traditional Class AB designs. Over the years, some Class D amps have received a bad reputation for having a sound that doesn’t come across naturally due to limitations in the digital circuitry. However, HiFi Rose’s Advanced Class D design resolves these problems with new, innovative materials.

The RA180 uses a GaN Advanced Class D amplifier that was developed by HiFi ROSE. Instead of Silicon FET technology, HiFi Rose used Gallium Nitride FETs— the result is a fast, highly-accurate amplification stage with almost no dead time—enabling it to perform naturally—more like a pure analog amplifier.

On the steampunk-looking front panel, there are a host of traditional tone controls powered by an op-amp instead of passive components that will let you control the treble, bass and balance. There are also variable EQ rotary controls that will let you tune the low-frequency turnover and high-frequency roll-off of the built-in MM/MC phono stage—plus, a plethora of switches for toggling between various modes are also accessible from the font panel.

On the rear panel, there is one balanced XLR input, three unbalanced RCA Line-in inputs plus one unbalanced RCA input for the built-in phono stage. There is also a subwoofer output, a trigger connection, two grounding points, and 16 speaker output terminals, so you can connect and A/B test two pairs of stereo speakers. HiFi Rose also developed a special stable power supply exclusively for the RA180 that responds to the power demands of the system, so the amp always sounds as clean and as natural as possible.

The RA180 is also a sophisticated bi-amplification system. It has two 200W amplifier modules per channel with one amp that is optimized to deliver stable mid-bass and balance, while the other is designed to deliver smooth, clean power to the higher frequencies—up into the “super tweeter” area beyond 20kHz.

When the two modules per channel are connected separately to a speaker’s high and low-frequency input, the signal to the speaker will be clean, controlled and absent of interference. The two amplifier modules per channel can also be set to a Bridge Tied Loads mode (BTL), which allows you to connect a single pair of speaker cables to each speaker and still benefit from 400W of balanced sound.

The RA180’s front panel doesn’t look like any other integrated amp out today.  The industrial appearance reminds us of the cool, retro all-silver Japanese receivers from the 1980s, or even something out of a steampunk novel by Jules Verne or H.G Wells!

Seeing this next to a very modern-looking piece such as an RS150 DAC/streamer with it’s super-wide touch capacity display was a striking match. We were blown away by the side-by-side aesthetic—especially when we stacked the RA180 integrated amp underneath an RS150 DAC/streamer.