Ready, willing and able…
By Roy Gregory
Given that the Levinson 585 is neither new nor even the latest integrated amp from ML, you might well wonder why it is being reviewed here. It scores no ‘Exclusive First Review’ points and arrives with no associated marketing spend – all too familiar reasons for products to receive exposure. Neither topical nor fashionably ground breaking, it has been around long enough to become part of the scenery and its inclusion is as prosaic as its presence. In the simplest terms, it is the best such unit that Levinson has built to date and given the stellar performance of its predecessor, that’s no mean thing. It demands attention precisely because it has become a part of the scenery, an ever present, a serial performer. A lot of readers ask what reviewers actually spend their own money on? Well, at least one of the answers is the Levinson 585, which is reason enough to write about it here.
As a reviewer, you inevitably assemble a select group of go-to, or benchmark, products – ones that you can rely on in almost any circumstances. For years, my personal safety net when it came to amplification, for everything from running in loudspeakers to those designs with anti-social impedance curves or recalcitrant sensitivities, was Levinson’s original integrated, the 383. Much more than just supremely competent, the baby in the Levinson range actually embodied more of the flagship Reference products’ musical virtues than many of the models in between. Relatively compact, astonishingly capable and unfailingly entertaining, the one-box Levinson delivered years of sterling service, so the eventual arrival of a replacement was met with a mixture of consternation and anticipation: consternation because you can never count on the new model being as good as the old one you know and love; anticipation because it might just be better – although in this case, my concerns were actually more specific than that; just like so many recent integrated amps, the new 585 included a DAC…
At this point you can be forgiven for feeling slightly puzzled. After all, the notion of a one-box solution that handles both digital and analogue inputs makes perfect sense, at least on paper – whether that paper is theoretical in nature or a marketing brief. Indeed, it makes so much sense that the public have clutched the “less boxes, less cost, more performance” mantra to their bosom without necessarily stopping to actually assess the deliverable performance. ‘Cos therein lies the rub; when it came to shoe-horning digital electronics into the same box as analogue amplification, one half of the odd couple always seems to be upsetting the other – and to make matters worse, the more ambitious the product, the more obvious those problems seem to be. So it was not without considerable trepidation that I unboxed the 585, partly because it threatened the status quo but not least because it weighed a hernia-threatening 32.6kg – or over 70lbs.
Bigger, heavier and twice as powerful as the 383, there was no mistaking the sense of almost brutal purpose that’s embodied in the 585’s neat symmetry and bold lines. This was clearly a serious statement of intent and if the performance was going to match up to the appearance, then it was going to have to impress. It did and the rest as they say, is history. The first serious amp to crack the digital integrated conundrum, the 585 has been an ever present ever since and although other amps have arrived since then to challenge its supremacy, it has maintained its benchmark status by virtue of its performance, power and versatility, buttressing itself against the competition by adding an impressive internal phono option designated by a .5 suffix. It shares the same operational ergonomics, display and intuitive interface that set standards on the 383 and still set standards today. While amplifiers like the CH Precision I1 and Rowland Daemon can surpass both the performance and capabilities of the 585, they do so at a considerable cost, with price tags of around four-times the one hanging on the Levinson. So, almost four years on, with a host of alternatives out there, just what is it that keeps me coming back to the 585?
