Michael Fremer of Stereophile had owned and reviewed almost nothing but tube amplifiers for more than a decade when an Ayre K-3 preamp impressed him so much that he bought Ayre's more expensive K-1. Ken Micallef hears the same pull in Ayre's newer amps, which pair "tubelike texture and an organic presentation" with "good bass but no sonic booms." Ayre's founder, Charles Hansen, designed his circuits without negative feedback. Most solid-state amplifiers send part of their output back to the input so the circuit can correct its own errors. Hansen left that loop out, and one of his reasons was that the speaker cable acts as "a large antenna" that would carry noise back into the input. What Hi-Fi? called the KX-R Twenty and VX-R Twenty the closest it had heard to "straight wire with gain." Ayre suits listeners who want the quiet and power of solid state with some of the texture of tubes.

The 8 Series is the way in. Ariel Brown says the EX-8 2.0 integrated amp uses the same input circuit and output stage as Ayre's costlier amps, and its modular design lets you upgrade it in stages. The step up is the AX-5 Twenty integrated, which Alan Sircom of Hi-Fi+ put "right in the middle" of the sweet spot where quality, performance and price meet. The R Series is the flagship, with the KX-R Twenty preamp and the MX-R Twenty monoblocks. Ayre builds every circuit fully balanced, so use XLR connections where you can. Mark Gusew of StereoNET heard more depth from the EX-8's balanced inputs than from its RCAs. The EX-8 comes with myrtle-wood blocks to go underneath, and Gusew found they helped cooling. If you find an older MX-R, it can go back to the factory to be upgraded to Twenty status.

Hansen had a degree in physics and designed Avalon's Eclipse loudspeaker before he started Ayre in Boulder in 1993. He cared about setup down to the last inch. He sent Fremer a set of wooden Jenga blocks to put under the 100-pound V-1 amplifier, and at one Consumer Electronics Show he spent five hours hunting for a fault in his system before he found a power cord touching the carpet where one wooden block was missing. Each MX-R Twenty monoblock is machined from 75 pounds of aircraft-grade aluminum, and Peter Roth of SoundStage! Ultra notes that Ayre's R components were among the first built that way. Wes Phillips called the MX-R "one of the most remarkable performers at any price." In 2013 the AX-5 introduced Ayre's version of the diamond circuit, an output stage first described by Richard Baker of MIT in 1964. Ayre also designed the audio circuitry of Neil Young's PonoPlayer, which Hansen called "the best thing I've ever done in my life."