Chord Suzi Review

Design

• Aluminium construction
• Polychromatic controls

Even Chord Electronics has had to acknowledge that there’s not a huge amount of scope when it comes to the design of a stereo power amplifier. Yes, the Suzi is winningly compact (just 69 x 215 x 100mm, HWD) but by the company’s standards it’s an unremarkable-looking aluminium box with just a couple of polychromatic control buttons and two headphone output sockets the liven the fascia. I’ll explain why those headphone outputs are inoperative in just a moment.

But while the Suzi power amplifier is nothing to write home about where its looks are concerned, it’s been configured to form the basis of quite a few different amplification options thanks to the modular nature of its design.

There’s an detachable aluminium block occupying most of the top portion of the Suzi. Remove this block and you can connect a Suzi Pre preamp/phono stage/headphone amp in its place – doing so brings the headphone outputs to life, as well as offering a trio of input options.

Or you could replace the block with Chord’s Hugo2 DAC – it has a volume control of its own, of course, so now you have a DAC/amplifier. Dock the company’s 2go streaming module too and your Suzi power amplifier is now a full-on network streaming amp that’s a Roon Endpoint and features UPnP and DLNA compatibility.

The 2go has twin microSD card slots, so as much as 2TB of solid state memory can be added – and for £300 Chord will sell you its USB multiplexer if your Hugo2 needs USB-B and USB-C data inputs rather than the old-fashioned micro-USBs it’s fitted with.

So there are plenty of options, should you require them, thanks to the modular nature of the Suzi power amp. For once, here’s a Chord product that doesn’t automatically look as clever as it actually is.

Features

• 30 watts per channel
• Ultima amplifier topology
• Can drive a single pair of speakers

30 watts of power per channel into an eight-ohm doesn’t look an awful lot when it’s written down. That’s because it isn’t. But Chord has designed the Suzi to be best suited for desktop or nearfield use rather than to fill a great big space with sound – and it’s also used its acclaimed Ultima amplifier topology here, which is at the heart of some outstanding Chord amplifiers costing many multiples of the Suzi’s asking price.

Connectivity is as minimal as you’d expect in a product of this type and of this size. Inputs consist of a single pair of line-level analogue RCAs, and there are outputs for a single pair of loudspeakers that require your speaker cable to be terminated with 4mm banana plugs. Other than this, the rear of the Suzi features a connection for the mains adapter, and a 12v output which connects to the corresponding input on the Suzi Pre.

Control options are sparse, too, because there’s not a huge amount to control here. One of the two polychromatic controls takes care of power on/off, while the other switches the AV bypass on or off. You’ll switch the AV bypass on only if the Suzi is powering two of the channels in a surround-sound system.

Performance

• Direct, informative sound
• Nicely detailed and organised presentation
• A little more dynamic than the power rating might suggest

As long as you’re not expecting sound pressure levels that could put your glazing in jeopardy, there’s an awful lot to like about the way the Chord Suzi power amp goes about the business of giving your loudspeakers what they need.

Its fundamental character is remarkably positive and uncompromising. A listen to vinyl pressing of Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden allows the Suzi to get on the front foot right from the off – it’s able to extract a huge amount of detail from the grooves and has no problem putting it all into convincing context.

Its facility with transient information is particularly impressive – at the leading edge of notes it’s almost fanatical, and no harmonic occurrence, variation or discrepancy is too minor or too fleeting to elude it.    

Its control of its low-frequency activity is such that momentum and rhythmic expression are confident, and there’s plenty of tonal variation at the bottom end to go along with an almost unlikely amount of out-and-out punch.

Midrange resolution is similarly assured, and there’s a stack of information regarding timbre and character revealed in voices. At the top of the frequency range the Suzi attacks with vigour, but isn’t ever in danger of becoming hard or glassy – even if you decide to explore the outer reaches of its capabilities where volume is concerned. The entirety of the frequency range together nicely, with no particular area given undue prominence.  The tonal balance, too, is quite decisively neutral.

There’s a fair amount of dynamic headroom apparent as the recording cycles through its peaks and troughs of attack and intensity. Naturally an amplifier with greater reserves of power to draw on can do a more complete job in this regard, but the little Chord is a game performer when asked to describe the various up- and downshifts. And it does so without giving a hint of breathlessness or stress – this is not a power amp that is easy to fluster.

The soundstage it’s able to generate isn’t the most expansive you ever heard, it’s true – but what it lacks in scale it makes up for in control and organisation. Even a complex recording like this one is laid out coherently, and the Suzi is able to keep a decent amount of distance between competing elements rather than letting them all pile up on top of each other.

It has its limits, of course – this is why Chord suggests it’s best suited to nearfield work. Ask it to perform towards the upper reaches of its ability where out-and-out power are concerned and naturally it will run out of steam at some point – what’s remarkable is just how much further off into the distance that point is than you might have imagined.

Should you buy it?