Bruce Candy, the physicist who designs Halcro's amplifiers, set out to remove something most listeners never knew was there. Play two notes together through an ordinary amplifier, Halcro says, and it adds faint extra tones that were never in the recording. Candy called them ghost tones, and his circuits catch those errors and cancel them inside the amplifier. On the test bench the results were close to absurd. Paul Miller of Hi-Fi News called his readings "the lowest levels of distortion I have measured from any amplifier." Brian Damkroger of Stereophile listened for any trace of the dm58s in his system and wrote that they "vanished." Halcro suits listeners who want to hear the recording and nothing else.

The Eclipse Stereo is the place to start. It's a big, heavy amplifier with power to spare for almost any speaker, and the lab that tested it for Australian Hi-Fi judged it stable even with electrostatics. Greg Borrowman found its two channels so cleanly separated that he could have believed he was hearing a pair of Eclipse Monos. It also gets along with most preamps, tube designs included, Peter Katsoolis of SoundStage! Australia says. Give it time to warm up. Bert Bazuin of Terrason Audio told Christiaan Punter of HiFi Advice that it needs about a day to reach full steam, and Punter found that it got "lusher, airier, and more refined" with every hour. If you want more, the Eclipse Mono gives each speaker its own amplifier.

Candy grew up in South Africa, studied mathematics and physics at Cambridge, and settled in Adelaide in the late 1980s as chief research scientist at Minelab, the metal-detector maker. He had been building tube amps since he was 13. Halcro's bookkeeper, Natalie O'Neill, watched him and engineer Lance Hewitt put the first amplifier together across two milk crates. That amplifier became the dm58, and when Paul Bolin of Stereophile played his first records through it in 2002, he described his reaction as "utter disbelief." Its H-shaped chassis won a design award, and turntable maker Mark Doehmann calls it "the Sydney Opera House of amplifier design." The Eclipse keeps that shape today, down to wooden feet a local luthier carves from mahogany or from 130-year-old Redgum fence posts. Punter called the Eclipse Stereo "the best amplifier I have heard, be it tube or transistor."