Something for nothing. Really? A free lunch. Immortality. Magical thinking. Say we could measure subjective performance parameters like 'air' with a convenient scale. We'd still find that even where air incurs zero change, in the presence of more midrange heft our hearing would call out a small reduction of air. It's the old nip 'n' tuck of plastic surgery. All parameters interconnect. Change one and affect others even if that's just to our senses not an oscilloscope. It's to our perception that our system plays, not inanimate measuring kit. It's why subjective changes override measured invariability. If increased weightiness in the mid and lower bands alters our perception of the top end, the latter did change even if we wouldn't measure it. It's how the reality of subjective perception obliges me to condition the earlier claim of something for nothing. It's not exactly true; just true enough to amount to it. Another area where this small offset factored was my trend to listen slightly louder. This wasn't by much at all. For real whisper sessions, my ears simply gave the EX-B7 a narrow edge.

That said, Albedo Audio's original 'Brightness in Sound' slogan remained in place. I wasn't dealing with dark minorly muddy dull scenery. It remained uniformly lit like a bright summer's day. All of these are my feebulous attempts at signalling shock over Mr. Liu's success at accomplishing what is typically mutually exclusive. Granted, my stereo 2.1 alliance ran Dazzle as a stereo amp. That's not its primary mode given how upon each power cycle, the amp defaults to the latest-used input 1-5 so must be remotely reset to bypass. When the current display can't black out so unmistakably shows 'bypass', why won't the onboard control logic remember that as our last-used input? It's no extra protection should someone use Dazzle in our absence and not understand that 'bypass' means full blast without a variable source. Unless we actually hook up the bypass inputs, there won't be sound. Exercising my puny punter-by-proxy powers, I thus vote to change that behaviour in a future firmware update together with showing proper 'Bypass' not 'By Pass', giving us a display-off option and fixing the 'Anf' typo on the rear panel.

Vividity. It really is the best word for Dazzle's showing in this system. The energetic components for which I've curated it suffered none for the increase in mass and density. In fact, the new balance of usual energy plus greater gravitas felt more vivid than before. What in this dimension distinguishes a flesh 'n' blood being from a ghost? Raw physicality. One casts a shadow, the other does not. Enhancing the pseudo-physical aspects of playback which deals in virtual performers—translation: invisible ghosts—builds a stronger illusion. My particular proclivities simply prefer erring on the side of quickness and transparency whenever it's a matter of either/or. For once it wasn't. The moody musical oracle was in a good mood. "Have both. Accept before I change my mind." Okay then. Geez. What a pushy mistress. I kept this fluffy when the rarity of the occasion felt dreamlike. It had my subconscious worried that it wouldn't last and prove to be wishful thinking; a temporary insanity. If this was insanity though, it was ongoing. The next session was just as thrillingly vivid. How did Google's AI define Dazzle? "A temporarily blinding bright light; to amaze or overwhelm with a particularly impressive quality leaving us speechless or taking our breath away; spellbind; stagger." There were more variations on the 'awesome' theme. Message received. Wasn't Dazzle ever aptly named? For someone of my stripes and downstairs system¹, definitely! You already saw that my going-in assumption proved out. Dazzle does bolt² on a dose of certain 'classic' class A traits without overwriting the brand's special treble virtues or veering into a darker lazier comfort sound. Relative to my earlier Swiss profiling, one could perhaps opine that initial Soulution-type voicing became current-gen Nagra to portray the voicing shift. Where that connection breaks to only be marginally useful is that no Nagra I reviewed was ever as uniformly lit up or stepped out as Dazzle.
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¹ With the upstairs Cobra speakers strategically voiced for maximum incarnation factor not just with their extreme driver arrays but boutique filter parts chosen for deliberate effect, Dazzle's parallel efforts over my usual Kinki stereo amp became too much of a good thing. To my ears it overcooked the dish.

² On the subject of bolting, Dazzle's winged binding posts are excellent in that without a wrench or any clicks, they allow extreme tightening of spades by hand. This is no blingware but a properly engineered functional part doing a brilliant job of its allotted menial task.

Bypassing the bypass. In my stereo 2.1-optimized setups with high-passed mains, running Dazzle as an integrated without pre-out was inherently compromised. Though I could easily rewire signal paths to eliminate subs, the speakers now trigger more room reactions. Those coarser acoustic interferences dominate and overlay finer electrical upstream changes. Against that proviso I did attempt to extricate Dazzle's linestage vs my TVC with active hi/lo-pass circuitry. If I interpret those tea leaves correctly, Dazzle's built-in properly active preamplifier with 13dB of extra voltage gain added more materializer action. That diminished the top-down cabriolet and speed aspects from instead using a premium passive-magnetic autoformer volume controller. Alas, I doubt that most punters will pursue a premium integrated only to use just half of it by running permanent 'bypass'. Their sonic assessment of the complete package should modify my own takeaway in power-amp mode. As always, this review reflects my findings, specific as those are by definition. But on that very personal score, Dazzle knocked loudest when I canvassed all reviews I wrote in 2025 to ask which most stood out as my Product of the Year.

Here we see the system with the earlier comparator EX-B7 monos removed to simplify the stack down to what was actually in play.

That was fortuitous. It neatly solved my critic's dilemma of feeling wedged between genuine personal enthusiasm in bypass; and my publisher's probably lesser excitement in integrated mode when that assessment had to subtract greater room feedback to be an educated guess at best. Rather than affix our usual Blue Moon Award which is our official expression of genuine globally applicable enthusiasm, today it's the less formal but just as significant…

… Product of 2025 declaration. It satisfies my calm competitive assessment on build quality, specs, functionality and value and lifts Dazzle properly above the crowd that is the massive volume of global hifi reviews each year. Incidentally, active preamps and I divorced silently many years ago. As a devout single-source guy, I didn't need source switching. I then curated my systems to not need even want the additive aspects of extra gain stages in extra components. On my desktop a COS Engineering D1 DAC with analog volume control does the honours. An alternate is iFi's iDSD Pro Signature DAC also with analogue volume. Upstairs it's a Cen.Grand DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe with analog volume. Downstairs it's a Sonnet Pasithea DAC with variable reference voltage on its R2R ladders. In that context it's no real surprise that I most fancied Dazzle as a classic stereo power amplifier. Hindsight. It makes us all momentarily smarter. For smarts lasting longer, we must work harder than (cough) giving things insufficient upfront thought to be caught out after the fact.