Alan Taffel of The Absolute Sound had never noticed a little bass line in the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" until he hooked up a CH Precision I1 integrated amplifier, and then it was "perfectly distinct." CH Precision's big idea is to hand the owner a dial most amp makers keep to themselves. Nearly every amplifier uses feedback, a loop that compares what comes out with what went in and corrects the difference. More of it gives the amp a firmer grip on the woofers, and too much, CH says, can blur timing and flatten dynamics. So CH builds its amps to work well with none and lets the owner choose how much to add. Jacob Heilbrunn puts the tradeoff simply: "The more feedback you use, the better bass control tends to become, but the price is usually a murkier overall sound." In the 10 Series, Robert Harley hears "body, timbral warmth, and dense tone color." CH suits listeners who want to tune an amplifier to their own speakers and room.

The I1 integrated is the place to start, because it puts most of CH's ideas in one box. Taffel found its amp section nearly identical to CH's A1 stereo amplifier, and its back panel takes plug-in boards for phono, streaming and USB, so it can grow with you. Alan Sircom of Hi-Fi+ says the sound of the separates comes down to the I1 "not so much 'trickle down' as 'rushes down in a torrent'." If you move to separates, Sircom's advice for the L1 preamp is to add the X1 power supply before a second L1, then go straight to the full four boxes. He also put the preamps on one table and the power supplies on another, a "brains stack" and a "brawn stack," and heard the noise floor drop a notch. Use the feedback dial with your room in mind. CH suggests more of it for speakers with heavy woofers or rooms with a lot of bass. Florian Cossy, the founder, adds one speaker rule, which is to avoid large horns in very small rooms.

Cossy was hired by Goldmund as a graduate in the mid-1990s, and he had dreamed of working there. He then spent 10 years designing for other brands, where cost versus performance was always a trade-off. Cossy founded CH Precision, which made its first products in 2009 and builds them in Préverenges, near Lausanne. The letters CH happen to be Switzerland's country code. The casework takes its cue from luxury watches, with small pins to locate parts and screws only to hold them together. CH's early range was built around a disc drive and a DAC, and Cossy says it was long seen as a maker of digital sources before people recognized its amplifiers. Sircom places CH on a Swiss continuum between the "slightly lush-sounding Nagra" and the "almost surgical precision of the Soulution." The 10 Series came around the company's 10th anniversary, and Roy Gregory counted it among the two or three products a decade that reset his expectations. "This is like Sergei Bubka turning up to the 1924 Olympics," he wrote. Harley named the L10 and M10 a 2022 Golden Ear and calls them "my reference electronics."