Roger Kanno of SoundStage! Hi-Fi had to put his ear right next to a tweeter before he could hear any hiss from a Bryston 4B Cubed. Chris Russell, who designed the company's first amplifiers, told Stereophile the job is to make the signal bigger and "to change it in no other way." Most amplifiers hand the music back and forth between two kinds of output transistor that never quite match, which leaves a tiny flaw at the handoff. Bryston's answer, which it calls Quad Complementary, is to pair each transistor with its opposite so both halves behave alike and the handoff stays clean. Reviewers hear neutrality. Kanno called the 4B Cubed "by-the-book neutral," and Tom Martin of The Absolute Sound found the 3B Cubed's bass "in proportion to the mid-range and treble." Bryston suits listeners who want power in reserve and an amplifier that adds nothing of its own.

Start with the 4B Cubed. Doug Schneider of SoundStage! has long considered it the sweet spot of the line, and Jason Thorpe, a tube listener, bought one for his own system. The 3B Cubed is the smaller sibling, and the 28B monoblocks are the step up for the hardest loads. Jeff Dorgay of TONE drove Quad electrostats, vintage Acoustats and Magnepans with a pair of 28Bs, and he advises a dedicated 15 or 20 amp line for each after the two tripped a shared breaker. Several models have a gain switch, and Marc Rushton of StereoNET found the 14B Cubed a touch soft at the lower setting and settled on the higher one. Give the 14B Cubed air, since its whole aluminum case helps shed heat, and Rushton recommends an open rack over a closed cabinet. If a tube preamp feeds them, Dorgay says to switch the 28Bs off first. Every Bryston ships with the printout of its own 100-hour factory test.

Bryston began in 1962 as a maker of medical equipment, named for founders Bower, Rybb and Stoneborough. John Russell, a NASA engineer caught in the layoffs when the Apollo missions ended, bought the company, and his son Chris decided sound equipment was what interested him. In 1973 he carried a prototype amplifier in a utility box to the recording studio Eastern Sound. The studio ordered two, so the Pro 3 went into production and later became the 3B. Russell laid out the first 4B from a circuit he had never breadboarded or put on paper, and it worked the first time. It went into production in 1976, and in early 1978 The Audio Critic called it "the best power amplifier we've been able to find so far." Bryston says the 41st 4B ever built still drives the JBL main monitors at Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton, Ontario and has run nearly nonstop since the late 1970s. The 20-year warranty began in 1990, and Bryston's Brian Russell told Doug Schneider why: "It's just easier for everyone."