Power Amplifier Reviews

Results with high-rez movie soundtracks were pretty spectacular. Both the music layer and the surround-intensive effects in the DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack of the Planet of the Apes (the 2001, Marky Mark edition) Blu-ray are first-rate, and the Rotel delivered both with full force. Scenes like the pod crash in Chapter 4 ripped through the viewing area with complete clarity and real impact.

The Rotel includes a “Cinema EQ” setting (essentially, a THX Re-EQ-like treble down-tilt) that can be invoked by input on the setup menu but not directly via the remote. This is a feature I applaud, though Planet was the rare disc that I found nicely balanced without it.

The RSP-1572 also has a 10-band fully parametric equalizer that can be set to operate either globally? or individually by speaker channel — a tweaker’s delight. This one can be accessed directly from the remote, via a small pop-up display, to modify frequency and gain.

The Rotel can play audio from a USB storage device jacked into the front-panel port, and a supplied Bluetooth dongle enables wireless audio streaming to the same destination. The Bluetooth hookup worked fine from my iPhone 5. You can also physically connect an iPod/Phone here, and get basic onscreen display of track and artist info, and remote skip/pause control. This worked as advertised with both an iPhone 5 and a 3GS (and with an iPod Classic), as long as I plugged the iDevice into the port before selecting the preamp’s “USB” input via remote or front-panel keys.

Rotel confines the RSP-1572’s video processing?to transcoding incoming analog video to HDMI, and scaling it up to 1080p resolution. Video upscaled from 480i to 1080i/p by the late-generation Faroudja DCDi chip set looked fine across all my standard video test-disc tracks, including film-pulldown tests that have caused some earlier DCDi chips to stumble.