When Alan Taffel switched from his reference amplifier to the Goldmund Telos 800, he was shocked. “The sound was so much… larger,” he writes in the February 2025 issue of The Absolute Sound. He finally settled on a better word: vivid.
He explains it with the wall of TVs at a big-box store, all set to “Vivid” so their colors pop at the cost of realism. “But imagine if, in the audio world, you could have all the benefits of a Vivid setting but without the downsides,” he writes. “That's what the Telos 800 does.”
The clue came at a day-long blues festival, where Taffel noticed that a live drum whack “just starts, coming out of nowhere.” Back home, he realized the Goldmund was doing exactly that. He compares it to an electric car: “full torque is available instantaneously at any speed with no lag.”
He heard it most in bass and drums. Through the Telos 800, the fast bass line on Sonny Rollins's “I'm an Old Cowhand” is “clearer and much easier to hear.” In the third movement of Mahler's Second Symphony, when the full orchestra comes in “dark and unrestrained near the movement's end, the effect is terrifying.” On Fleetwood Mac's “Over and Over,” the slow build becomes “all but unbearable—until it's finally shattered by one of Mick Fleetwood's rare cymbal crashes.”
The Telos 800 is a stereo amplifier rated at 300 watts per channel into 8 ohms, priced at $89,000 at the time of the review. Taffel calls it “far and away the best amp I've had in my system,” and he sees it as evidence of a revived company: “I can confidently report that Goldmund has essentially been reborn.”
His conclusion: “To my ears it represents a sea change in sonic capability… If I could afford it, I would. As it stands, I'm not sure how I'm going to live without it.”
Read the complete review, learn more about Goldmund, or find a Rhythm dealer near you to hear the Telos 800 for yourself.
