Parasound Halo JC 1+
Soon after I took over preparing Stereophile’s biannual Recommended Components listing from the magazine’s founder, J. Gordon Holt, in 1986, I ran into a problem. With so many products listed, the magazine was running out of the necessary pages to include them all.1 To solve this problem, I looked at how long a typical product remained on the market before being updated or replaced. The answer was 3–4 years. I therefore implemented a policy that unless one of the magazine’s editors or reviewers had continued experience with a product, it would be dropped from Recommended Components after three years.
But what about a product that continues unchanged in production for years, or even decades? Consider Parasound’s Halo JC 1 monoblock power amplifier, designed by legendary engineer John Curl and originally reviewed by Michael Fremer in February 2003.2 The JC 1 took up residence in Class A in Recommended Components in the April 2003 issue and remained there through the October 2018 issue. Every year for 15 years, either someone from the review team or I would drag the amplifiers out of storage and compare them with whatever we were using to determine if they were still worth recommending—they were.
However, Parasound’s Richard Schram announced in the summer of 2018 that a revised version of the Halo JC 1, with significant reworkings by John Curl of the circuit and parts, was coming down the ’pike. I put my name down for a review.
External differences
The original JC 1 cost $6000/pair in 2003, and by the end of its production life the price was $8990/pair. (According to an online inflation calculator, $6000 in has reviewed in recent years.
