Rotel RB-1582 MkII Stereo Power Amplifier

The top and side panels are typical fare for the price: a single piece of perforated and folded black metal that’s secured to the chassis on each side with two large, nicely black-chromed screws. Five large feet (four corners and center) support the RB-1582 MkII’s roughly 40 pounds. Being somewhat old school, I find the mass of an amplifier -- or any other complicated device -- reassuring. Obviously, newer designs, especially the increasingly high-quality sound from class-D circuits from Rotel and others, don’t demand the parts or power overhead and their resultant mass. Change is afoot, but today was happily a class-AB day.

On the rear panel are both single-ended RCA and balanced inputs, separated by a switch for choosing between them, and two pairs of binding posts per channel. (The original RB-1582 had only RCAs.) The five-way binding posts are easy to screw down tightly without tools. However, the lower two posts were too close to the bottom of the chassis for my less flexible speaker cables. Fortunately, I usually place amplifiers on an MDF platform that sits on my carpeted floor, which raised the Rotel enough that I could connect my speakers without putting strain on the cables or connectors. The proximity of the top set of posts to the bottoms made it hard to connect to them from the bottom, and the balanced connector is in the way when trying to connect to them from the top. If you have reasonably flexible speaker cables, you’ll be in good shape. The single-ended connectors are sufficiently far outboard of the binding posts that they have no impact on other connections. Also on the rear panel are a replaceable fuse, a standard AC connector, and a set of handy in/out trigger ports, grouped with an on/off switch of their own.

Rotel specifies the RB-1582 MkII as a class-AB amplifier providing 200Wpc into 8 ohms. Its output power will vary with the load your speakers present to the amplifier, as usual. Total harmonic distortion (THD) is specified as less than 0.03%, and the frequency response as 15Hz-100kHz, +/-1dB, which should cover everything within the audioband with plenty of treble headroom. The signal/noise ratio is a claimed 116dB, the power consumption 550W. The RB-1582 MkII never got excessively warm to the touch in its time here.