Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click here.
Most hi-fi enthusiasts agree that the 1970s can be considered the golden age of the stereo receiver, which is essentially an integrated amplifier with a radio-reception capability. Stereo receivers were everywhere back then. By the 1980s, however, as separate components gained popularity, stereo receivers fell out of favor. The prevailing view was—has been—that standalone components (e.g., preamplifiers, amplifiers, tuners, CD players, phono stages) can be optimized for the particular function they serve without compromises and should therefore be able to offer superior performance to integrated components. Receivers and integrated amplifiers became second-class citizens of the hi-fi domain.
In recent years, thanks to advances in parts and design, many integrated amplifiers have attained performance comparable to that of a good preamplifier–power amplifier combo and regained market prominence. They typically take up less shelf space, do away with interconnects, and cost less. Has the time come for a full comeback of the stereo receiver? I put this idea to the test with the T+A R 2500 R.
About component clutter
One of the main characters in the popular sitcom Modern Family is Gloria, played by Sofía Vergara—an unabashedly loud and boisterous Latina stereotype, one I sometimes recognize in my Venezuelan wife. The two share many traits, including spontaneous outbursts of expletives, which may variously be expressions of excitement, happiness, anger, or just about anything else on the human emotional spectrum.
Case in point: a couple of weeks before Christmas, as I walked in the front door, I was greeted with a heartfelt “Are you going to get rid of this shit soon? I NEED SPACE HERE!” The object of my wife’s wrath, her furiously gesticulating hands made perfectly clear, was the stereo console and various components on and under it. She knew this was no junk, of course—she loves this system. It was the clutter that got to her.
“Do you mean all the boxes?” I asked cautiously.
“Yeah, all this shhh . . . stuff. It’s Christmas; I need this space for decorations.”
To avoid escalation, I promised to replace all that . . . stuff with something I assured her she would approve. “Just give me an hour,” I said. “A Christmas special!”
She left in a huff, while I went to the garage to retrieve a T+A R 2500 R receiver that had been sent to me for measurements and photography in support of Killain Jones’s December 2024 review on this website. For a while, it would replace a Simaudio Moon 791 streaming preamplifier, a Simaudio Moon 761 power amplifier, and a Marantz CD 50n streaming CD player.
Now, having used the R 2500 R for some time, I thought I’d share with you my own impressions of this receiver.
Factors for consideration
Although many will balk at the price of the R 2500 R—$18,800 (all prices in USD), rising to $19,720 with the optional phono stage—prospective buyers should carefully weigh this receiver’s price against its build quality and capability.
One reason for the R 2500 R’s high price is that it’s made in Germany, at T+A’s own factory, not in Asia. But the price also reflects the level of engineering effort that went into its development, as demanded by an ambitious design goal: to go beyond the mere packing of a large number of features into one box and offer the kind of performance expected from separate components. T+A’s engineers managed to do just that: they endowed the R 2500 R with a rich feature set and stellar performance while avoiding electrical-noise interference and other pitfalls attendant to integrated designs.
The great care taken in the design of the R 2500 R and its manufacturing was apparent to me on my visit to the company in December 2023, when I saw the first production units being made and spoke with staff (see the video coverage of that visit on our YouTube channel).
It’s important to emphasize that the R 2500 R is much more than an integrated amplifier with a tuner, as most receivers of yesteryear were—it is replete with features and functionality. I won’t even try to cover it all here; instead, I’ll focus on what matters most: sound, usability, and versatility. But buckle up. There’s still plenty to cover.
Power supply
The R 2500 R’s all-aluminum chassis is commensurate with its price. It is polished to a bright silver luster and features a clear, round window on top engraved with the T+A logo through which you can see some of the circuitry. It is of considerable size, measuring 6.5″H × 18.1″W × 16″D, but at 30.8 pounds it is surprisingly light. Front-panel VU meters indicate left- and right-channel power output, which lends the R 2500 R an authentic vintage look.
At its core, the R 2500 R features a preamplifier and a class-AB stereo power amplifier, both incorporating technology trickled down from T+A’s flagship HV-series. But unlike HV-series’ components, which employ traditional, massive linear power supplies and are therefore quite heavy, the R 2500 R employs a lighter high-frequency sinusoidal power supply, and is comparatively lightweight. According to T+A, it “combines the sonic advantages of transformer power supplies with the stability of switching power supplies. High-frequency interference common in switching power supplies is avoided by the sinusoidal cycle, and the last residual interference is eliminated by the intelligent reloading of the integrated filter capacitors: Their reloading capacity is 100,000 reloads per second, 2000 times that of typical power supplies.”
The R 2500 R is specified to output 140Wpc into 8 ohms or 250Wpc into 4 ohms, figures we verified in our lab. The volume knob tracks in 1dB increments throughout its range and provides both a satisfying tactile feel and an audible series of soft clicks as it moves through its steps. Bass, treble, loudness, and balance controls are also included, but being the purist that I am, I didn’t touch them. I prefer to keep the signal path as simple and direct as possible.
Digital converters, connectivity, and filters
Two separate DAC sections are built into the R 2500 R: one for PCM data streams and another for DSD. This underscores T+A’s effort to optimize the R 2500 R’s performance. The PCM section is built around four stereo 32-bit sigma-delta converter chips in dual-differential configuration, while the DSD section uses a proprietary one-bit DAC architecture.
Several wired digital inputs are available to feed these circuits: one coaxial (RCA) and two optical (TosLink) S/PDIF, two HDMI (plus HDMI ARC output), one USB (Type 2.0), and one ethernet (RJ45). Wireless connectivity includes Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Supported resolutions vary by input, USB handling the highest: up to 768kHz PCM and DSD512.
A USB 2.0 port on the front panel allows connection to an external drive, which I frequently used to play my locally stored music files. Once my Samsung T3 solid-state drive was connected, I could browse its directory structure using either the front-panel menu or the T+A MusicNavigator G3 app, which can be used for setup, operation, and streaming control. T+A doesn’t specify playback resolutions for this USB input, but I had no trouble playing PCM files up to 24-bit/192kHz. The R 2500 R is Roon Ready and Plays with Audirvana–certified, and it supports Apple AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, and UPnP/DLNA. The MusicNavigator app provides access to Amazon Music HD, Deezer, Qobuz, and Highresaudio, as well as to Airable internet radio and podcasts.
Another way to feed the PCM DAC is via the built-in CD drive, accessible through a front-panel slot. This is a welcome addition for listeners with existing CD collections but for many others, too, since the format seems to be undergoing somewhat of a resurgence. One might wonder why T+A didn’t include an SACD-compatible drive, given that T+A has long supported the format and that the R 2500 R has a DSD DAC (the DSD64 format is what’s used on SACDs). I asked, and the answer was simple: cost. High-quality SACD drives are rare and expensive, and including one in the R 2500 R would have raised its already-high price.
The PCM section offers four user-selectable oversampling digital filters: FIR Long, FIR Short, Bezier/FIR, and my preferred filter, Bezier. FIR filters are common, but the Bezier filters implemented in the R 2500 R, which were designed for optimal time-domain performance and date back to the 1990s, are unique to T+A. The R 2500 R also includes two PCM non-oversampling filters, which should be used with external oversamplers, T+A advises; otherwise, a significant high-frequency roll-off will occur, resulting in a dull sound. The DSD side has two filters, but I didn’t play any DSD files and didn’t try them.
Full-featured tuner
The tuner section supports more than just analog FM radio; it also includes HD Radio, a digital radio technology transmitted through traditional FM and AM signals. Both FM and HD Radio are available in Canada, and I was able to tune in to broadcasts of both types. To get the best reception, you should use an external antenna, of course. I used my trusty Magnum Dynalab ST-2 antenna, which I’ve had for many years.
The R 2500 R also supports DAB and DAB+, digital radio formats common in Europe and Australia but not in Canada, so I couldn’t test them. It does not support AM radio, an acceptable omission given the poor audio quality of AM.
Additional features and usability
Another outstanding feature of the R 2500 R is its high-quality headphone amplifier, interfaced by a 4.4mm Pentaconn connector on the front panel. I didn’t test this amp in my audition, but Killain Jones did in his and wrote about it favorably. Diego Estan, our measurements specialist, thoroughly evaluated the amp in the lab and confirmed its strong performance.
An optional phono stage is available, specific to either a moving-magnet (MM) cartridge or a moving-coil (MC) one. The review unit came with the MC-specific phono stage, which I tested with a Denon DP-3000NE turntable equipped with a Denon OJAS DL-103o cartridge. The DL-103o is a low-output device, but the 64dB gain of the phono stage proved sufficient.
The R 2500 R can be controlled by its supplied remote, the MusicNavigator G3 app, or the front-panel interface. With ten control buttons (apart from the power button), the front panel may appear a little cluttered, but I often found it simpler to get to a feature I wanted or invoke a function using the front-panel buttons and display rather than the app or remote. Overall, I give T+A high marks for making this feature-rich and complex product relatively easy to set up and use.
One feature that is conspicuously absent from the R 2500 R is a maximum-volume limiter. The assurance this feature provides that the volume cannot inadvertently be raised to a level where the speakers sustain damage—a real risk with touchscreen volume sliders or side-mounted buttons—is invaluable to me, a must for peace of mind. I mentioned this omission to T+A and recently learned that by the time you read this article, a firmware update will have added this feature to the R 2500 R.
Setup
With everything built into a single component, setup couldn’t be simpler. The speakers I used were the Arendal Sound 1528 Tower 8s that I reviewed in December. For my audition of the Arendals I used the Simaudio Moon 791 streaming preamplifier and 761 power amplifier, which retail for $30,000 together. The Tower 8 ($9500/pair) is a large full-range speaker with a fairly high sensitivity (reportedly, almost 90dB at 1m/2.83V) but a low-ish, challenging impedance of around 4 ohms. I was keen to find out how the R 2500 R, which outputs 250W into 4 ohms, not 400W as the Moon 761 does, would handle these speakers. I kept them in the same positions I had them in before—9′ apart, tweeter to tweeter, their back panels 2′ from the wall behind—and ran inexpensive QED XT25 speaker cables to them (under $100, now discontinued) from the receiver.
For vinyl playback I used the Denon DP-3000NE turntable with the Ojas DL-103o cartridge, as I mentioned. The R 2500 R’s built-in CD drive obviated the need for a CD transport, but you can see one in some of the accompanying pictures, a Shanling ET3, which I had at the time for review. The ET3 has coaxial (RCA) and optical (TosLink) S/PDIF outputs as well as AES/EBU (XLR) and USB. I connected its coaxial output to the R 2500 R with a Furutech FX-Alpha-Ag cable and its USB output with a generic USB cable. I encountered no issues with either output. For streamed music, I used Tidal.
Sound
Back in December, when I auditioned the Tower 8 speakers, I limited myself to CDs, streamed music, and local music files. It was all digital playback of music I knew well, and I was therefore able to get a good sense of the sonic nature of these speakers. With the R 2500 R I went beyond digital: I listened to vinyl, FM radio, which I had not listened to in years, and HD Radio, which I’d never explored before. But since each source of music has its own sonic character, as does the receiver, it was difficult to determine whether it was the source or the receiver that specific sound qualities could be attributed to.
But I decided to defer critical listening and first test how accessible and easy to use some of the R 2500 R’s functions were and how well they worked. I tried quite a few functions and encounter no usability issues. I paid particular attention to the CD drive: first, to confirm that it operated quickly, quietly, and reliably (which it did), then to verify whether it supported gapless playback, a feature that some disc transports lack. (For the uninitiated, some albums are intended to play seamlessly from start to finish with no silent intervals between tracks. Gapless playback ensures that.) Many albums can be used to test gapless playback. I used Pink Floyd’s The Wall (the 1988 double-CD Canadian version, labeled Columbia C2K-36183) starting from “Vera.” The transition to the following track, “Bring the Boys Back Home,” was seamless. No silent interval was inserted between the two tracks.
Throughout the time I had it, the R 2500 R proved perfectly capable of driving the Tower 8s. In my 16′ × 18′ listening room, it provided sufficiently high volume levels and robust bass. It never felt “pushed” at high volume, nor did it show any sign of clipping or strain. Although the R 2500 R’s power was sufficient for my listening preferences, and would doubtless be so for most listeners, those accustomed to high volume levels may opt for greater driving power. Arendal recommends about 200 watts per channel or higher (into 8 ohms) for the Tower 8s, but since every 3dB increase in speaker output requires a doubling of amplifier power, the wattage requirement grows quickly.
Finally, having gained familiarity with the features and functions of the R 2500 R and a sense of their usability and usefulness, I turned to critical listening. In his review, Killain writes, “The sound was highly resolving, especially in the higher frequencies.” Right from the outset, with both CDs and streamed music, I too noticed the R 2500 R’s strikingly clear, pleasant highs. This was particularly evident on Bruce Cockburn’s “Pacing the Cage” and the title track from his album The Charity of Night (CD, True North TND 150 and 16/44.1 FLAC, Tidal), where there was a radiant sparkle to his acoustic guitar and pristine clarity to both the instrument and his voice. I observed similar qualities on other recordings, such as a cover of “I’m Not in Love” by Bjørn Fjæstad, featured on a 40th‑anniversary compilation CD from speaker maker DALI, The DALI CD Volume 6. I had played this track on several systems and had always been moved by this singer’s tremendous presence and the richness of his close-miked, full-bodied voice. I felt the same way with the R 2500 R’s presentation, but Fjæstad’s voice also had a certain litheness to it and the kind of clarity I was accustomed to hearing with my Simaudio Moon set and would normally expect only from separate components.
I was now curious to hear what the R 2500 R’s digital filters could do. The default setting, FIR Long, yields the flattest frequency response across the audioband (which may have contributed to Cockburn’s guitar sparkle). I experimented with the other three filters, and though the audible differences between the four were subtle, I eventually settled on the Bezier filter. This filter produced a slightly more relaxed sound—just as clear but with a touch less sparkle. Our measurements show that with 16/44.1 content (i.e. CD resolution) the Bezier filter rolls off the high frequencies more than the other filters, which explains the slight reduction in sparkle.
It was simpler with vinyl. Apart from the R 2500 R’s bass and treble controls (which, as I mentioned, I avoid), no tonal adjustments are available with phono playback. The LPs I played, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (Warner Bros. BSK 3010) and Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love (Columbia COC 40999), among others, sounded exactly as they should. The phono stage provided neutral playback, neither boosting nor attenuating any portion of the frequency range. Moreover, it was very quiet. With the volume turned to maximum and no music playing, I could hear some hiss, but this is common with phono stages and is due to their high gain. This one seemed quieter than most, though, and the level of musical detail it recovered impressed me. Diego’s measurements of the phono-stage section confirmed these impressions: in the charts, the noise level shown is low, and the frequency response is quite flat from 30Hz upward. (The measurements do show a slight rise below 30Hz, about 2dB, but LPs typically have their frequencies curtailed below about 50Hz to reduce distortion and improve stylus tracking, so this shouldn’t be audible.)
Like Killain, I, too, found the R 2500 R to be highly resolving of musical details, and just not in the high frequencies. Whatever the source was, I heard nothing to suggest that sound quality was compromised somehow. On the contrary, it was consistently clear and effortless, and enabled me to discern the kind of nuances in recordings that I normally notice only with the best reference-grade separate components.
In fact, the R 2500 R includes functionality that helped me compare one recording to another. For example, I wanted to compare two versions of Bruce Cockburn’s “Pacing the Cage”: a 16/44.1 WAV file ripped from the CD release of the album that I have in my collection, and the 16/44.1 FLAC file from Tidal. Using the MusicNavigator G3 app, I placed both files in the playback queue so I could toggle back and forth between them. After dozens of toggles, I concluded that the two sounded identical.
I compared different versions of the title track from the Eagles’ Hotel California in a similar manner, this time stacking four FLAC files in the queue: a 24/192 version from Tidal and three 16/44.1 versions ripped from different CD releases—an early CD release (Asylum E2 103), a 40th‑anniversary release (Asylum RR2‑103), and the acclaimed 1992 DCC Compact Classics release (GZS‑1024), widely considered the best sounding release. Sure enough, the R 2500 R delivered the latter with a fullness of sound and clarity that the other releases couldn’t match. Second place went to the 24/192 Tidal version, followed closely, almost indistinguishably, by the 40th‑anniversary version. The early CD version sounded muted, band-limited, and thin. It was by far the worst.
Pleased as I was with the R 2500 R’s digital and vinyl playback, I was most impressed, and quite surprised, by its FM and HD Radio performance. While not quite on par with the sound quality of streamed music or music from spun media, FM/HD radio astonished me sometimes with its high resolution and low noise. Fellow reviewer Jason Thorpe remarked that there is something about the midrange of most FM stations that just sounds right, natural, almost tube-like in richness.
In the end, I used the R 2500 R’s tuner far more than I had anticipated, and I imagine many buyers within reception range of high-quality broadcasting would do the same. Invest in a good antenna if you do. This relatively inexpensive accessory makes a significant difference in reception and is absolutely necessary to get the best out of the R 2500 R’s radio tuner.
Conclusion
T+A’s modern-day take on the stereo receiver, which for the past four decades has been on the margins of mainstream hi-fi, makes a strong case for its comeback. Rather than just creating an all-in-one electronics component that’s merely convenient and good, T+A has built something truly great—because not a single feature of this unit could be considered a weak link.
The sheer number of features the R 2500 R has to offer can feel overwhelming at first. But once you become familiar with its control interface—the remote control, the companion app, the front-panel touch buttons, and the small on-screen display—it is intuitive to set up and operate and invites exploration of its many functions, some of which are extremely useful.
The R 2500 R isn’t cheap, but I don’t consider it overpriced either. If you were to buy a set of components that provide the R 2500 R’s full functionality and sound quality, you’d not only end up with a messier system, one cluttered enough to be awarded a few choice words from your spouse come Christmastime, but probably a more expensive system too. As I wrote in an editorial piece in January, the T+A R 2500 R was one of my favorite components of 2024 “for its sound quality, build quality, and features.” I feel even more sure of this today.
. . . Doug Schneider
das@soundstage.com
Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click here.
Associated Equipment
- Speakers: Arendal Sound 1528 Tower 8
- Turntables: Denon DP-3000NE with Denon Ojas DL-103o moving-coil cartridge
- CD transport: Shanling ET3
- Preamplifier: Simaudio Moon 791
- Power amplifier: Simaudio Moon 761
- Speaker cables: QED XT25
- Digital cables: Furutech FX-Alpha-Ag and generic USB
- Power cord: Shunyata Research Venom HC
- Power distributor: Shunyata Research PS8
- Acoustical treatments: BXI Sound Absorber panels (20), Tönnen Sound panels (2)
T+A Elektroakustik R 2500 R streaming CD–receiver
Price: $18,800; $19,720 with optional phono stage
Warranty: Three years, parts and labor
T+A Elektroakustik GmbH & Co. KG
Planckstrasse 9 - 11
D-32052 Herford
Germany
Phone: +49 (0)5221-7676-0
Fax: +49 (0)5221-7676-76
Email: info@ta-hifi.de
Website: www.ta-hifi.de
