The Sound
Contents
Man, man, man… What a sound. What immediately stands out with the Rotel Michi S5 and P5 is the transparency. Everything is so incredibly easy to follow. The middle and low areas in particular are full of definition. Bass parts, start of a piano note, vocal detail: the Michi plays with verve. Really high level.
Rotel Michi P5
This high level is due to both the pre- and power amplifier. Both have enormous qualities. We notice this immediately when we switch from the coaxial input to the Metrum Pavane which goes single ended to the P5. That may sound different, but the dac of the Michi P5 is practically at the same level. You read it well: the dac of this 3500 euro Michi is almost the same as our Metrum Acoustics Pavane. It’s a game of leapfrog with qualities.
De Metrum plays with a little more calm in the middle area, but the Michi P5 puts down more space in the presentation. The Pavane has a little more high refinement, but the Michi again more low definition and punch. In the end it just differs per track what we think is better. And that says it all about the performance of this pre stage. It’s a wonderful device. So you need to have a very nice dac to surpass its qualities.
Rotel Michi S5
The Michi S5 is a beast with two gigantic toroidal transformers, 16 nuclear-powered transistors and no less than 188,000 uF of capacity. You can weld with this if you wish. We’d rather just play music. And the S5 does so with absolute authority. Like a Badr Hari, the Michi goes into battle with the woofer of the Focal. Although: struggle… it’s more like a case: do as I say…! Even at very high volume we can hardly see the woofer moving. But the low-end is there. What an unprecedented control. It’s insane.
But not only in the bass, the control is obvious. If we play Aafke Roman A12, the whole presentation is stable as a rock. She’s just standing there. She sings, she plays the piano. Everything‘s just there. Without mistakes, without sharpness. That sounds like the most normal thing in the world, but it’s not. In case of an unbalanced (soundwise) system, this track will be forced. Hard, glassy and grainy.
Clean and 3D
If we have to describe the sound of the Rotel Michi S5 and P5 it is clean and very spacious: uncolored and 3D. We’re right in the music with every track. A force that certainly not every system possesses. And in our opinion, Rotel does not directly own either. This Michi set does have the magic touch that makes us want to play track after track. And that is mainly thanks to the insight it offers and the space it manages to create. And for that reason a well-deserved Alpha Approved!
Other speakers
We also played briefly on our cinema and on a set Definitive Technology D15. Either way, the Michi set will love it. And that’s not surprising when you consider that the S5 simply has an abundance of power. There’s – we estimate – hardly any speaker that doesn’t play on this. The Michi M8 is for the few who may want to play with mono’s or have an impossibly inefficient loudspeaker. 500 watts per channel in 8 Ohms, 800 watts in 4 Ohms. That seems enough to us.
