Ross Mantle of The Audio Beat was playing Glenn Gould's Bach through a pair of Allnic monoblocks when he noticed he could hear what the piano was made of. "The Allnic amps filled in the rest of the body of the piano, right down to the legs and pedals," he wrote. He gives the credit to the transformers. Allnic winds its own, on cores of Permalloy, a nickel-iron alloy first made at Western Electric, and the name Allnic comes from "all-nickel." A transformer passes the music from one coil to the next through its core, and Permalloy, Mantle explains, responds more readily to very small signals than ordinary iron does. Art Dudley of Stereophile called the 300B-based A-5000 DHT "a tone-lover's amplifier," and Allnic suits tube listeners who put tone color first.

Allnic started with phono stages, and they're still a good way in. The H-5500 is the smallest of three, and Alan Sircom of Hi-Fi+ says no one will ever be able to call it entry-level. It takes both moving-magnet and moving-coil cartridges, has gain to spare for low-output ones, and borrows its step-up transformers from Allnic's bigger models. Sircom calls the sound warm and "unapologetically retro," and he found it made even toppy 1980s recordings listenable. The H-3000 shows how differently Park thinks. Most phono stages restore a record's tone balance with resistors and capacitors, and he uses coils instead, which he says brings better dynamics and bass. For amplification, the M-3000 monoblocks run four big KT150 tubes a side for 200 watts a channel, and Mantle liked them best in pentode mode. The L-9000 preamp also works well with solid-state amplifiers.

Park grew up in the South Korean countryside in the 1950s with two older brothers who were electricians, and he built his first small amplifier in middle school. His parents steered him toward the liberal arts, and he studied French literature, but he kept building gear on the side. In 1990 he cofounded Silvaweld, which became known for single-ended triode amplifiers, and he told Hans Wetzel of SoundStage! Ultra that he started Allnic on his own in September 1997. His first Allnic product was an LCR phono preamp. Park says the only other one on the market in 1997, from Audio Note of Japan, cost $75,000, and his cost $3,000, and it sold well. By 2000 he was exporting, and Germany was the first country outside Korea to take his products. Park designs every Allnic product, and Marc Mickelson reported in 2010 that he also builds each of the company's moving-coil cartridges himself. Srajan Ebaen of 6moons compared the company's spirit to Kondo, Shindo and Yamamoto in Japan.