September 2019

Best Of 2019 Blue Note Equipment Awards
Enjoy the Music.com celebrates the best high fidelity audio gear of 2019!
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  Enjoy the Music.com's Best Of 2019 Blue Note Awards celebrates the many great achievements by audiophile manufacturers within the high-end audio and Hi-Res Audio industry. Our 2019 Blue Note Awards is a culmination of 19 years of reviewing and carefully choosing what products have earned special recognition for our annual awards. Our Best Of 2019 Blue Note Award celebrates the finest products we have reviewed during the previous 12 months. Recipients have been carefully chosen after much debate and consideration by our staff of reviewers. With each passing year our industry has experienced great advancements in technology including analog circuitry, vinyl LP and analog tape playback, digital-to-analog converters (DACs), headphones, loudspeaker design, plus of course portable media players, computer software and streaming media.

While there are many great pieces of high fidelity audio equipment now available within the marketplace, Enjoy the Music.com's Best Of 2019 Blue Note Awards is compiled from products we have reviewed within the past 12 months that have earned extra special attention.

From September 2018 through September 2019 our staff chose a lucky 21 products that have earned this award. This is quite generous as in 2018 we chose 18 products, and in 2017 our staff chose 17 high-end audio components to receive an Enjoy the Music.com Blue Note Award. Thus, choosing 20 products during 2019 is in fact the highest number of audiophile products we have ever awarded!

Let it be said here and now we make no apologies that during 2019 our staff chose only 21 products to receive our special Best Of 2019 Blue Note Award. With so many products spanning an array of categories reviewed from late 2018 through September 2019, this does not mean that everyone gets an award. This is not to say that other products do not merit your attention, it is simply that only the very best of the bunch should stand out and be recognized clearly and concisely.

Note: Enjoy the Music.com does not carry over products from our Best Of 2018 Blue Note Awards or from our Blue Note Awards 2017 (or any other awards for that matter). With all that said, our longstanding staff here at Enjoy the Music.com, with hundreds of years in combined expertise, now presents to you our choices for Best Of 2019 Blue Note Equipment Award. And the winners are:

Triangle Art TA-200M Class A Monoblock Power Amplifiers
Price: $73,000 per pair
Click here to read the complete review.

  Yes, they are expensive, but they reproduce music with the most uncolored, transparent, and powerful sound that I've ever heard in my system. I doubt that the musicians who recorded the music have ever heard it played back with such a high level honest and thrilling level of fidelity .When listening to the TA-200Ms Class A monoblock amplifiers in my system they did this in a way that I've never experienced before. It was as if I was sitting within the music, observing the sounds as almost as they were physical objects that I could reach out and touch. There wasn't separation of instruments and groups of instruments as before, because now the sound created a three-dimensional sonic diorama in front of me.

And to the sides of me, and above and below me. I realize that I might be exaggerating a bit for effect. But the best I could explain this phenomenon was to compare it to being enveloped in sound like when attending a live event. Although what I was hearing was not a live event, and when listening to music that never was intended to be performed, it didn't matter. When listening to music through the TA-200M monoblocks, I considered it the ultimate in discovering the intentions of the musicians, engineers and producers who made their work in the first place.

They weigh 125 pounds each, you'll need at least two. They are each about two feet deep, a foot and a half wide, and almost a foot tall. They get hot. And they are very expensive. But they are also the ne plus ultra in power amplifiers. And so, if you can afford them, you are doing yourself a great disservice by not auditioning them, because you will likely consider purchasing a pair of these masterpieces. 

Previous Annual Blue Note Awards