Larry Greenhill had just warmed up Constellation's least expensive power amplifier, the Inspiration Stereo 1.0, when a choral recording stopped him. "It was a Wow! moment," he wrote in Stereophile, with the choir standing out against a black background "with bell-like clarity." Most amplifiers split each sound wave in two, sending the top half through one kind of transistor and the bottom half through another, and Constellation argues that because the two kinds never behave quite alike, the halves never match perfectly. Its Balanced Bridge design uses a single kind throughout, with two matched amplifiers in each channel and the speaker connected between them. Alan Sircom of Hi-Fi+ hears in the Inspiration amps the "grace, clarity, and open mid-band of a small single-ended tube amp" with serious solid-state power behind it. Constellation suits listeners who love what tubes do for voices but own speakers that need a big amplifier.

Start with the Inspiration series. Aron Garrecht of SoundStage! Ultra found that the Inspiration Stereo 1.0 shares most of its circuitry and parts with models costing four to nine times as much. Above it come the Revelation, Performance and Reference series, with Statement at the top. For the step up, Michael Fremer called the Performance Centaur Mono "the sweet spot of the Constellation line, in terms of quality per dollar," while Irv Gross of Constellation gives that title to the Revelation series' Taurus amps. If you pair a Constellation amp with a Constellation preamp, try the Direct XLR input, which skips the amp's own gain stage. Garrecht heard a darker noise floor that way, and Mark Craven of Hi-Fi News liked the Revelation 2 best through its regular balanced input, so try both. Jason Kennedy of The Ear describes the Integrated 1.0 as strictly neutral and got fabulous results with warmer Q Acoustics Concept 500 floorstanders. The big amps handle hard loads, and John Atkinson heard the Centaur II 500 cope easily with Wilson Alexia speakers.

Constellation began in 2008 with David Payes and Murali Murugasu, the Australians behind Continuum Audio Labs and its Caliburn turntable, and Peter Madnick gathered what Michael Fremer called a "dream team" of amplifier designers, among them John Curl, Bascom King and Demian Martin. Alex Rasmussen, third-generation president of the Neal Feay Company, designed the machined aluminum cases. The company arrived at CES in 2010 with amps, preamps, DACs and phono stages in two lines at once. Its earlier flagship, the Reference Hercules monoblock, served Robert Harley of The Absolute Sound as his reference for many years. A new generation of Constellation amplifiers now uses the company's own switch-mode power supplies, which co-founder Murugasu calls "the single biggest change to our architecture and sound." The Statement monoblock at the top of the range makes 1,700 watts into 8 ohms, and Harley calls it the best-sounding solid-state amplifier he has heard.