Sprout is the brainchild of the young passionate audiophile Scott McGowan, the son of CEO of PS Audio Paul McGowan. It is a new stereo integrated amplifier that he designed, partly motivated as a way of bringing into the high-end fold a younger generation of music lovers who for the most part are typically viewed as only listening to music in MP3 format on an iPod, iPhone and with headphones.
In addition to a well-made internal power supply, it contains a passive EQ moving magnet phono preamplifier, a powerful headphone amp (with a 1/4” jack), a stereo Class D amp at 50 watts per channel (at 4 Ohms, 32 watts at 8 Ohms), an analog preamplifier, a 24/192 fully asynchronous DAC (with XMOS USB input, using a fine Wolfson WM8524 chip), and an analog stepped volume control. It also has a built in Bluetooth receiver that allows wireless streaming to its DAC. And all of this for a retail price of $799.
I had the pleasure of meeting Scott McGowan in his delightful ‘Sprout Lounge’ when I helped cover the RMAF back in October 2014 for Audiophilia; but I did not have a chance to listen to the Sprout at length let alone carefully analyze its diverse capabilities. McGowan kindly helped arrange for me to obtain a Sprout for this review.
Read the full review at Audiophlia: Sprout by PS Audio Audiophilia