CONTINUACIÓN ...

The KI, on the other hand, is less easily rattled and holds on just that little bit longer, keeping the sound together and under better control, with less immediate impact but noticeably more detail and definition. There's also no feeling that the sound is being restricted in any way, and perhaps the best way to describe the overall effect is that the KI sounds somehow smoother in the way it handles the bass. For an intuitive analogy of sorts, think of two stones of equal size, a rough piece of sandstone and a polished piece of granite. Despite its sophisticated finish, the granite clearly is the tougher and harder - and frankly more interesting - of the two. The KI feels a little like that.

Pseudo-poetic bass apart, what of higher frequencies? The difference seems less marked here. The midrange of both amps is very detailed, highly neutral and very well defined spatially, leading to excellent stereo imaging. Just occasionally, listeners felt that the basic amp had the edge in image specificity over the KI, but if there was a difference it was so small as to be barely repeatable. The KI did seem to offer slightly more depth though, in most cases. As for the treble, again the KI had a slight advantage in cleanliness, though in a couple of tracks the basic appeared to be slightly ahead on extension and 'air'.

And as we found the first time round, switching from Class A to Class AB mode can often be a complete non-event. Obviously if you drive the amp flat out in Class AB and switch to Class A the resulting distortion will be blindingly obvious and very horrible, but short of extreme cases like that there's very little to hear. Maybe, just maybe, Class A is a little sweeter and more clearly defined tonally with well-recorded acoustic material, but then Class AB seems more detailed in quiet passages. Experiment by all means - it can't do any harm and however you look at things you'll be in little doubt that you're listening to a very fine amp.

So to the crunch: does the 50 per cent price hike justify itself? It's hard to say. If the 7200 didn't exist we'd recommend the 7200 KI at £500 like a shot anyway. Probably the fairest way to deal with this is to say that the law of diminishing returns very slightly favours the basic model, but the KI is a damn fine £500 amp in its own right. If you can afford the difference, audition it, but if you can't, then don't bother gnashing your teeth over it. It is, after all, just a matter of taste.