Parasound Just Hit a Home Run with this integrated amplifier.
Reviewed at $1,195 USD

I first heard of Parasound when I bought the JC1 amplifiers for my Magnepan .7i. These were some beefy monsters that practically drove anything with ease. At the time I was debating between Parasound and Bryston to power my Magnepans. I ended up choosing Parasound because I preferred the more robust bottom end it provided.

Time flies by and few months ago I hear that Parasound was brought back into Canada. I still remember the expression on my face when I first heard their JC5 and A21+ power amplifiers. It was simply stunning and much improved from the original JC1 that I owned. The bass was fuller yet more controlled and cleaner. The midrange was just perfect; not too laid back nor too in your face.

You can say that Parasound amplifiers were nothing short of stunning as it should be with large transformers, high capacitance, high current design, and great engineering. As much as I loved them, they were too heavy for my practical use (as a reviewer, I need to move things around in my system all the time on my own) and the price was out of my comfort zone. Don’t get me wrong, if you can afford the bigger Parasounds, they are worth every penny – I literally just did not have the money at the time.

I Now, would it not excite you if a company that is so invested in crafting big transformer-based, heavy class A/B amps decided to come up with an all-in-one integrated class D amplifier – promising similar musicality at a fraction of the cost of their big amplifiers?

This is exactly what happened. The Parasound classic 200 was introduced and simply had everything I ever needed in a unit. Well… it doesn’t work as a streamer but that may be asking for too much. It has a quality DAC (the same DAC used in their P5 Pre-amplifier), phono stage (mm and mc), subwoofer out with optional high pass crossover, in case your subwoofer doesn’t have it’s own controls, lots of analog and digital input/output options, tone control, channel balance and an incredible remote.

The integrated amplifier runs 110 watts per side at 8ohm or 4ohm loads, making it an ideal partner for most speakers. For my review, I hooked it up to the Tekton double impacts, Elac vela, Tri art OB4, Klipsch RP-8000F, Klipsch RP-600m, Monitor audio Gold 50 and Buchardt s400 SE. In all cases, the Parasound classic 200 had the bottom end control of a typical high end Class D amplifier while retaining open characteristics of a Class A or Class A/B amplifier – this is unheard of in class D amplifiers at this price point. Given that its costs were stretched to cover many of the functionalities within the unit, it was truly amazing how the DAC, phonostage and the amplifier sounded beyond my expectations.

One thing I forgot to mention in my video review is the headphone section. There are two ways it integrates with headphone and stereo output functions:

• Stereo still plays while headphone is plugged in
• Stereo stops playing while headphone is plugged in

I find the latter approach to make more sense and the classic 200 does just that. The amp is powerful enough to drive most headphones with the exception of really demanding headphones such as the Hifiman HE6. Sound wise, it is a very neutral. One complaint is that it has only a standard 3.5mm headphone output. I wish they added a quarter inch output for headphones.