Buy one component and save 10% on up to 2 cables. Buy 2 components and get 4 free cables. Free shipping on USA orders over $700. Low-cost shipping to Canada.
Buy one component and save 10% on up to 2 cables. Buy 2 components and get 4 free cables. Free shipping on USA orders over $700. Low-cost shipping to Canada.
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by Benchmark Media Systems June 12, 2019
"In the past decade, Benchmark consumer products, especially its digital-to-analogue converters, have achieved acclaim for ultra-low distortion and clean sound."
"While the company is very strongly engineering-oriented, it maintains that listening tests are critical to product development."
"The HPA4 is Benchmark’s latest headphone amplifier. This amp is unusual in that it features a THX-888 Achromatic Audio Amplifier, which is claimed to reduce distortion by 20–40 db through a patented feed-forward design resulting in the world’s most linear amplifier."
"In addition to the THX amp circuitry, Benchmark has gone slightly nuts (in a good way) with the volume control, offering 256 levels in 0.5 db steps via an array of relays."
"Benchmark doesn’t stop there. The HPA4 is a high voltage, high current design to allow low sensitivity headphones to work well."
"In addition, the damping factor is high (near zero ohms output impedance), with the aim of sounding the same with low, medium, and high impedance headphones."
"That’s all great, but many fancy-sounding circuits sound like dirt. Happily, that isn’t the case with this one."
"The HPA4 is exceptionally good at presenting a layered, dynamic yet relaxed sound."
"You can hear these rich results on, for example, Eliza Gilkyson’s Hard Times In Babylon [Red House], where the instruments not only are clearly differentiated but also sound fully rendered, as live instruments do."
"You also can hear the overtones of each instrument as they decay, which makes them sound more real."
"This adds up to a super-revealing amp that isn’t going to correct the mistakes of the rest of your system. I thought top-flight headphones sounded great as a result, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the amp for you. I, however, wish the review sample didn’t have to go back."
- Tom Martin, HI-FI+
Read the entire review at HiFiPlus.com →
After this review, Hi-Fi+ selected the HPA4 as one of the "Top 100 Products of the Past 20 years" (1999 to 2019).
by Benchmark Media Systems July 22, 2025
"With over 40 years as an audiophile and more than half those years as a hi-fi retailer, I feel I’ve finally put together a stereo that ticks all my sonic boxes. Those being in order of priority, dynamics, scale, tonal accuracy, fatigue free resolution and soundstage."
"For the last 25 years I’ve been fortunate to have a dedicated listening room. I use acoustic treatments from Real Traps, Vicoustic and Primeacoustic."
"My Benchmark components consist of the DAC3 B (connected to a Naim NDS streamer), LA4 line amplifier and two AHB2 power amplifiers run in bridged mono mode. All cables are Benchmark too."
"The Benchmark gear in my system has brought what I have wanted in my list of sonic priorities as listed above and then some. They have delivered way beyond what I thought could be possible in my system in my room."
"I’m delighted and stunned daily as my vast music collection comes to life on a whole new level."
- Ricky Dasler, Living Sound, Nelson New Zealand.
by Benchmark Media Systems June 02, 2025
"Geoff Pesche weighs in on how the mastering team at Abbey Road Studios achieve first-class results." - Mix with the Masters
"The biggest sonic improvement in mastering in the last 5 or 6 years is D/A and A/D converters and that's very very important - what you have at the front and the back of the chain."
"We use fairly new Benchmark converters front and back."
"Abbey Road like a uniformity between the rooms so all of the rooms have the same A/D and D/A conversion."
- Geoff Pesche, Mastering Engineer, Abbey Road Studios
by Benchmark Media Systems May 13, 2025
"Benchmark Media Systems’ no-nonsense approach to all things audio is rare today."
"This is a DAC that’s uniformly good at everything. It resolves well, has good imaging properties."
"It makes a balanced, honest sound that allows you to sit and listen to music for hours. That is what makes Benchmark’s products consistently popular with audio engineers. You don’t want ‘bright’ if you sit at a mixing desk 10 hours a day. "
"It also has the latest version of Benchmark’s jitter attenuation system (UltraLock3) and doubles down on the digital demon with its multi-mode asynchronous USB system."
"Benchmark also uses the distortion compensation facilities built into the ESS chip to reduce second and third order distortion."
"The net result is a DAC that delivers lower distortion, lower noise, less passband ripple, faster signal switching and locking onto signals and a more linear frequency response."
"The Benchmark Media Systems DAC3 B is very much in the ‘leave no trace’ school of good audio."
- Alan Sircom, hi-fi+