The Progression integrated amplifier from Dan D’Agostino Master Audio Systems is an outstanding option both in terms of its audio performance and its compact size. It is a smaller version of the D’Agostino Momentum integrated amplifier and one of the best integrated approaches to putting every critical element of high-end audio electronics into one unit that I’ve yet auditioned.
Making the High End Nearly Invisible
The high sound quality of the Progression is its key merit, but anyone who is familiar with the problem some audiophiles encounter with their partners over the impact a high-end system can have on room décor know it is a real issue. Accordingly, let me begin by noting that the Progression manages to fit all its features—including two functional front-panel meters—into a unit that only measures 17.25 inches wide by 6.63 inches high by 20.13 inches deep, although the quality of its componentry is indicated by the fact that it weighs some 57 pounds.
Coupled to its high sound quality, this means the $20,950 Progression can be the core of a far less intrusive high-end audio system. If you do choose to display it where it can be seen, its styling its quietly excellent, and its superior heatsinks mean that it is easy to place on almost any shelf. At the same time, it is also the first component I’ve encountered that allows you to conveniently place all your electronics out of any line of sight. This is particularly true if you use its optional streamer and DAC ($7000). It has Bluetooth remote control with a usable range far greater than that of conventional IR remotes, which allows you to place the unit outside the line of sight. It also has an iPad application that can control the amp and select the music to stream. Via an innovative Wi-Fi application, you can control the Progression while selecting your music sources like Roon, Tidal, Qobuz, and Spotify in a single package of electronics that only requires that a computer running the Roon Core be connected to the network along with the Progression. This reduces the visibility of a high-end system to two speakers and speaker cables.
This kind of setup does mean you have to give up whatever status comes from owning a large and highly visible mix of separate high-end electronics. You won’t have larger amps than the other audiophile kids on your block. You also won’t see the two meters on the Progression’s front panel, which are works of art in themselves.
At the same time, you can also keep visibility low without relying on streaming. You can hook up a separate DAC/digital-disc player, turntable, analog tape unit, and FM tuner in ways that also place them out of sight. The Progression has two single-ended inputs and three balanced inputs including a theater pass-through and an optional phono preamp. There are also balanced preamplifier outputs, which make for convenient inclusion of subwoofer(s) in a system. In practice, this allows you to conceal or minimize the visual impact of every component.
These features have a few quirks that I’ll come to later in this review, but they can make the Progression the core of one of the most “décor-friendly” approaches to high-end sound that I know of, and this can matter with many wives and partners. I have all too much experience with non-audiophiles, who love to listen but don’t like to look. We audiophiles may understand our passion for the high end, but let’s face it: A good part of the world takes one look at a large high-end system and concludes that they want to live without one.
The Sonic Case for an Integrated Amp
At the same time, I should stress that there is a strong technical case for an integrated amplifier like the Progression that has nothing to do with its visual impact. It is also one of the few integrated amps whose high-level inputs have sound quality that is good enough to show that an integrated amp can actually make full use of the potential advantages of integrated electronics over separate components.
These advantages are all too real. Integrating a streamer DAC, phono preamp, preamp, and power amp into one unit allows a manufacturer to create a design where the sonic nuances of all the electronics in the system can be “voiced” to have the same overall sound quality—something that is virtually impossible with separate components. As every high-end audiophile has already discovered, the potential advantages of such an integrated approach are all too audible when you try to blend the different “voices” and sonic nuances of each electronic component to get fully coherent sound quality.
While separate electronic components have an obvious advantage in terms of quieter and more complex circuitry, add operating features, expand power-supply size, and advance other aspects of performance, size and complexity come at a cost. No individual component is ever sonically neutral, and each component has at least a slightly different mix of sonic nuances or “voicing.” In practice, this means you have to evolve a system where the nuances of each electronic component in your system corrects or reinforces the nuances in another. This is particularly true when you try to blend separate components from different manufacturers, but I often hear significant differences in the voicing of components from the same manufacturer. Equally important, you do not need a Laocoön’s worth of snaky interconnects—where each added interconnect also adds its own nuances to the sound of your system.
In most cases, a carefully blended system does sound better than an integrated amplifier, and there are many choices of mixed components that do sound as good or better—albeit at what is usually a higher cost. The Progression does, however, take a highly advanced approach to integrating all its circuitry. It minimizes the use of feedback. Unlike many of its rivals, the Progression uses discrete, balanced, direct-coupled circuits that filter RF noise from the AC powerline and compensate for asymmetric power waveforms and DC on the mains.
D’Agostino also states that the Progression has a 2000VA, high-current transformer with the same unique winding technology employed in its Momentum M400 amplifier. That transformer is the core of its power supply, feeding 24 complementary 15-amp silicon power transistors, each capable of 250V operation and delivering 200 watts of power
The end result is that I’ve found the Progression has enough power to deliver 200 watts of real musical power per channel into 8 ohms and 400 watts into 4 ohms. Specifications matter, but so does listening, and all too many separate power amps that I’ve auditioned measure well in technical terms but do not deliver the life, dynamic contrasts, and impact you want when you are actually listening to music. The Progression delivers all the musical power needed for use in even large and absorbent listening rooms, and its signal-to-noise ratio via its high-level inputs and optional streamer is truly excellent. Moreover, its heatsinks are so efficient that the Progression gets warm but never hot with anything approaching reasonable space around the amp. You can take visual advantage of its comparatively small size and excellent front-panel styling if you do want to display it in an area where it can be seen.
The Progression’s Sound Quality
A detailed description of the sound quality of the Progression has to be divided into three different parts: First is its sound quality as an integrated amplifier using its high-level inputs; second is its sound using its optional streamer, and third is its sound using its optional phono preamp.
The sound of the amplifier and optional streamer are both nearly identical and very good to excellent. Their performance with low- to high-level dynamics was outstanding. So was its reproduction of musical detail and ability the reveal the differences between types of digital recording and levels of resolution.
The Progression did an excellent job of resolving detail and dynamics from low-level solo instruments and voices up to loud and complex challenges like Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (“Symphony of 1000”) and the final bands of Saint-Saën’s Third (“Organ”) Symphony. Its only audible limits were in delivering deep bass at frequencies below 40Hz, where you normally have to use a subwoofer to get the best results (and where room colorations usually dominate the sound).
As is true of the best high-end components today, there were no sonic nuances that significantly changed the sound of even the most challenging recordings, and no surprises or sudden “revelations” that indicated the electronics were altering the sound. The sonics and nuances of the recording came through, as did the nature of the miking and the venue (when the recording had a real soundstage). This was particularly clear in the cases where I have recordings made of live performances that I’ve actually attended and in venues I’m familiar with.
The music came though regardless of whether I listened to jazz, folk, rock, or classical. So did the extent to which a given recording revealed that it was assembled or modified and had low-level noise problems in the original source. And so did the increasingly minor differences imposed by the use of different high-end streaming services. Far too many components impose more of their own nuances than the Progression.
As for the details of voicing in timbre and soundstage with depth and image size, they were again minor. Overall timbre was very natural with excellent solo recordings of given instruments, small musical groups, and solo voice. If there was any particular character to the Progression’s sound, it was that the transition from the bass to the midrange was as natural as the best recordings permit. This may sound slightly warm to some audiophiles, particularly since there seems to be a tendency to slightly raise upper midrange and lower treble in both recordings and equipment to provide more detail and apparent soundstage separation, but I prefer the natural warmth of musical instruments, and the last thing I want is even a touch of added hardness in strings, woodwinds, and brass.
The sound of the Progression is not “warm” in character like some tube or Class A units, but it is also not voiced to have a slight rise in apparent upper midrange and lower treble detail—something that I, as a classical music fan, can do without. I wouldn’t call this choice in the Progression’s voicing coloration but realism, and it does have the advantage of revealing a bit more depth where the recording is actually one with a real soundstage. In any case, I think that we reviewers tend to exaggerate the importance of some of these differences. They are far less apparent with top-quality, high-end electronics today than they were even a few years.
The sound of Progression’s amplifier and streaming option also had another advantage I touched upon earlier. The amplifier and optional streamer are extremely quiet when there is no music playing, even at levels that were very loud when the music played. The only sound I heard from the streamer with no music playing was the faint noise I hear from some streaming services on all equipment with no music playing and the volume control set at high. I think we often understate the importance of this “silence” in terms of equipment and cable noise in reviews, but then I live in a separate house with a large yard and garden on a cul de sac. The sound of silence is golden in more than one sense given today’s real estate prices.
And this brings me to my one major uncertainty about the Progression’s sound The phono option ($2200) installed in my review sample was not as quiet at high listening levels with no music playing as it is with the best phono preamps, and the noise was slightly higher in the left channel than the right. This was true with the phono inputs shorted as well as with my turntable hooked up and regardless of whether its cable was grounded to the Progression’s chassis.
I should stress that the musical sound quality of its phono option was still very good and matched the quality and voice of its high-level inputs and streaming option, and that the phono noise level was acceptably low when I was playing actual music. I should also note that far too many separate phono preamps have noise levels that equal that of the Progression’s phono option. This may reflect my biases as a reviewer, but I’ve found that as the sound of streaming gets better and better, I have less and less tolerance for added noise from a phono preamp. Listening to the best records is still a great experience. Listening to noise from a phono preamp is not.
The Progression’s phono preamp also has some features that make it harder to adjust to get the best results with some cartridges. It is not designed to be a universal phono preamp. It has a fixed 60dB gain rather than variable levels of gain and a fixed level of capacitive loading, although it does have a wide range of selectable resistance loads. I did ask the manufacturer to name some matching cartridges but did not receive a reply. Accordingly, I’d suggest you audition the phono option vary carefully and work with your dealer to get the best matching cartridge—one that has the sound character and nuances you desire—before you choose the phono option over a separate phono preamp.
Quibbles About Set-Up Instructions and Manuals
Finally, the owner’s manual is well written and comprehensive, but not quite up to the user-friendly standard that this product deserves. In saying this, I don’t mean to pick on the D’Agostino Progression alone. About half the high-end products that I get in for review have the same lack of separate set-up instructions and manuals that do not cover every contingency in a logical and explicit way. There certainly is no correlation between the quality of the instructions and the rising price of today’s high-end equipment.
In fact, the Progression’s instructions more than meet the standard set by most competing equipment. If anything, they have fewer poorly written commands and options and show fewer signs of being written by an expert who is so familiar with the equipment. These manual writers don’t appreciate that a user who lacks this expertise may need more detail and attention about how to set up and operate a complex unit.
The Progression manual—complete as its coverage is in many respects—does not have a separate set of set-up instructions. It does not provide enough detail on the Progression’s remote control and application features or warnings about possible problems if you do not use the right approach. Like virtually every other high-end component I have reviewed or set up in recent years, it does not fully explain how to optimize the unit for each major streaming service—many of which have instructions and web sites that are even more opaque than high-end equipment manuals. The entire high-end industry needs to do better, and like far too much in our new era of artificial intelligence, it needs to use ordinary consumers to test its manuals and instructions.
Summary Judgment
The Progression is a really high-quality audio product in virtually every respect. It is not cheap, however, and needs to be judged accordingly. The Progression alone costs $20,950. The optional streamer costs $7000, and the optional phono unit costs $2200. I believe the integrated amp and streamer option are well worth their price in competitive terms. I’d be more cautious about the phono preamp option. Its overall sound quality is very good, but cartridge compatibility and preamp noise level may be issues, and I advise listening carefully to the phono-preamp option before including it and to work closely with your dealer to choose a cartridge and approach to connecting and grounding your turntable that produces the best results.
Specs & Pricing
Output power: 200Wpc into 8 ohms, 400Wpc into 4 ohms
Output impedance: 0.1 ohm
Analog inputs: 4 stereo pairs of balanced XLR, 2 stereo pairs of single-ended RCA
Digital inputs (w/DAC module installed): 1 USB-B type, 1 optical, 1 SPDIF, 1 coaxial, 1 Wi-Fi, Ethernet RJ45,
Phono loading (w/phono module installed): 47k ohms, 10k ohms, 2k ohms, 1k ohm, 500 ohms, 200 ohms, 100 ohms, 50 ohms
Frequency response: 1Hz–80kHz, -0.5dB; 20Hz–20kHz, ±0.01dB
Signal-to-noise ratio: 95dB, unweighted; 75dB, A-weighted
Total harmonic distortion: 0.015% @ 1kHz at 200W into 8 ohms
Input impedance: 100k ohms
Outputs: 1 pr. balanced XLR stereo, 5-way speaker binding posts
Dimensions: 17.25″ x 6.63″ x 20.13″
Weight: 57 lbs.
Price: $20,950–$30,100
Dan D’Agostino Master Audio Systems
5855 E Surrey Drive
Cave Creek, AZ 85331
(480) 575-3069
(203) 644-8743/Petra D’Agostino
dandagostino.com
