English Acoustics Stereo 21c stereo power amplifier

Of course, making such a design comes with its own baggage; those of us who have experienced the Leak Stereo 20 are going to struggle not to see a carbon copy of that amplifier. Especially if that experience is rose-tinted memory. Let’s be truly honest here; for all its sonic excellence, the Leak Stereo 20 was a bit ‘raw’ by today’s standards in finish terms. A folded metal chassis with sharp ends and corners are not that popular today (damn snowflakes and their dislike of bloodstains). Similarly, creating a chassis without a baseplate in 2021 might not end well from a legal perspective, given there are some really high rail voltages in all that exposed wiring. So, in that part alone, the Stereo 21c makes for a more refined design, with its nicely finished, well rounded CNC milled chassis and baseplate with the company brand used as ventilation. Then there’s the finish itself; Leak made them in a rich shade of dark gold, but that wasn’t the thickest coat of paint in history. Even those that spent most of their lives cocooned in a closet ended up looking beaten up with chipped paint and lost logos. English Acoustics would have upped the game if it had reached for the Hammerite, but instead has made the finish a feature. The range of finishes is being added to all the time; as we went to press, the company announced a ‘flip-paint’ version that varies between blue, purple, and green depending on the angle of view… a colour scheme popular with sea monsters and their friends and family, no doubt! But in all seriousness, the review sample came in a rich British Racing Green the depth of which you wouldn’t find on a Bentley made this side of the 1930s. This contrasts nicely with the Art Deco English Acoustics logo, which occupies the same space the Art Deco logo of Leak once lived. There are twelve standard colours, with two additional finishes unique to stores (the Navarra Blue exclusive to PJ Hi-Fi and the Porsche Perlmutt Weiss finish unique to Art+Sound) and custom finishes in their infinite variety command a £500 premium.

The amplifier itself is wired point-to-point with discreet components on boards, just like the original, although what used to be a series of small mica boards connected by low-cost wiring is now a single board with beefy etched tracks connecting the sections. The wiring connecting the valve seats to the board – and the board to the transformers – is immaculately ‘dressed’ (not dissimilar to a Naim amplifier), no loose assemblage of wiring loom here, everything is laid out like a Frank Pick tube map. That, together with the considerably more rigid tolerance of high-grade components on the circuit (even down to the silver mica caps of old; they could never be made to this precision in the 1950s) makes the Stereo 21c perform like a ‘blueprinted’ version of the Stereo 20.

Even those two large, potted caps on the top plate are given a touch of English, with the screen caps hiding some exceptionally high-grade caps stripped back to fit perfectly; given you could shine a light into the amp on most older samples on this part of the top-plate, this is an improvement to both looks and safety. On the subject of safety, this is where English Acoustics parts ways from the 60+-year-old design. First, it has a soft-start round power button (against the ‘plug and pray’ nature of the original). Then it has both thermal and motion-detection cut-outs, so tubes about to blow or someone knocking the amp off its perch is unlikely to cause any kind of electrical crisis. This is useful in a product that doesn’t include a valve cage, even if this puts the Stereo 21c somewhat at odds with current thought regarding valves. That being said, I can’t think of an easy way to create a cage for these valves without materially changing the aesthetics, and not every brand follows this edict anyway.