Cambridge Audio CXA81 MkII

Verdict

There wasn’t a huge amount wrong with the original CXA81 so Cambridge Audio hasn’t tried to fix what isn’t broken. Instead, they have honed and tweaked a good amp and made it better. At £1,000 this is the class of the field.

Introduction

When it comes to the business of making integrated amplifiers that don’t cost as much as a decent used car, Cambridge Audio has a very strong track record. 

Since their relaunch all the way back in 1994, a succession of keenly priced models have ensured that thousands of them have found happy homes. The changing shape of hi-fi thirty years later means that the CXA81MkII is a more substantial device in terms of price and specification than its ancestors but the DNA is there.   

Of course, Cambridge Audio isn’t the only company that knows its way around an integrated amplifier and there’s no shortage of competition for your cash. Is the CXA81 MkII still the one to go for?

Availability 

The CXA81 MkII is available in the UK through the Richer Sounds chain of stores for £999 and it can also be purchased online through their website or direct from Cambridge Audio for the same price. It is available in the USA for $1,199 and in Australia for $1,999 AUD. 

At the time of writing (late June 2024), a supply of the preceding ‘non MkII’ CXA81 was still available in certain locations for a lower price. This is (as I shall cover) similar but not the same as the MkII but is a tempting offer at the price point. 

Design 

• Full width, ‘Lunar grey’ casework 
• Useful front panel controls
• Logical and clearly labelled rear panel 

As the name suggests, the CXA81 MkII is a revision of the original CXA81 which is itself a revision of the original CXA80 that dates all the way back to 2014. The reason for this very gradual rate of change is that there wasn’t terribly much wrong with the original design so Cambridge Audio hasn’t rushed to change it. 

The CXA81 MkII is not the most exciting looking device going; it’s a chunky 430mm wide box finished in the company’s ‘Lunar Grey’; a not quite grey, not quite silver effect that is specific to Cambridge Audio. The idea is that it will sit happily with black and silver devices but the reality is that it doesn’t really match either. 

The simplicity of the CXA81’s design hides some really clear and impressive thinking. The CXA81 has many inputs and they can all be accessed via buttons on the front panel and the remote control rather than having to cycle through multiple inputs to get to where you want. The volume control also has a start and stop point which means it can have a physical position indicator which is also an underrated thing. These might sound trivial but they make the Cambridge Audio very easy to live with. 

No less useful is something on the back panel. The CXA81 MkII has a significant quantity of inputs and this can be confusing if you’re wiring up by leaning over the top of it. Cambridge Audio has long recognised that labelling inputs with inverted text on top (and the correct way up below) massively simplifies this process and the CXA81 benefits hugely from this approach. 

Features 

• 80 watts of power into 8 ohms 
• Extensive analogue and digital inputs 
• No streaming, HDMI ARC or phono stage 

The on paper performance figures of the Cambridge are solid rather than spectacular. , You get 80 watts into 8 ohms which rises to 120 watts into 4 and, while this is perfectly respectable, some rivals at the price have more power still. This doesn’t tell the whole story though. 

Look through the vents in the top and you’ll see a centrally mounted power supply that one of the biggest going anywhere near the price and it supports a circuit that has been carefully tweaked in this new version to deliver the best performance possible. Something that could be potentially be handy is that this power is made available to two sets of speaker terminals which could allow you to run a second pair of speakers in another room for example. 

Analogue inputs comprise four RCA line inputs and single XLR connection. This ‘shares’ input 1 with an RCA connection so if you are using it, there are only three RCA inputs remaining but this is still more inputs than many rivals can muster. The balanced connection in particular a fairly rare thing to find at the price. 

What makes it particularly notable is that it is still only half of what the CXA81 MkII is wired to do. A digital board featuring a single coaxial input, two optical and one USB-B connections supports the analogue board and, rounded off with aptX HD Bluetooth, gives the Cambridge Audio huge flexibility in how you choose to use it. The USB has PCM decoding to 24-bit/384kHz and DSD256 support which should be quite sufficient for most requirements.

What is important to stress though is that the CXA81 MkII is not an all-in-one system. There is no streaming on board via wired or wireless and if you’re looking to connect a telly to it, the lack of HDMI ARC might be a bit of detriment (although it won’t sound any different to an optical connection).

There is also no phono stage but this is mainly because Cambridge Audio does very well out of building standalone ones and, if you aren’t a turntable user, you aren’t paying for something you aren’t using. Ultimately, the Cambridge Audio is an amplifier and not an all-in-one system and the connectivity reflects this. 

Sound Quality

• Exceptionally even handed presentation.
• Great performance via XLR
• Less brilliant performance from Bluetooth

Cambridge Audio has built a great many different products over the years at a variety of different price points but what has tied the vast majority of it together is a performance that is the very definition of ‘balanced.’ The CXA81 MkII is an absolutely perfect example of this in action. 

So long as you haven’t chosen a truly mad pair of speakers that have a very strong personality of their own (I used the Mission 700 and the Elipson Planet Gold Edition during testing, neither of which suffer from this) and might very well find that the first twenty minutes of listening to the Cambridge is… fine? It doesn’t sound bad; far from it, but some rivals might have done something more attention grabbing in that time. 

Keep listening though. Keep changing styles and tempos and what the Cambridge Audio does begins to make more and more sense. With the wonderfully ballistic Sound & Fury by Sturgill Simpson, the CXA81 MkII is big, confident and engaging. The brooding and potent Remember to Breathe is delivered with deep, well timed bass and an impressive sense of scale. Then, when you change tack completely and play To Build a Home by The Cinematic Orchestra, the Cambridge morphs into something completely different. All the ballistic energy bleeds away and you become aware that this is capable of genuinely lovely tonal realism. 

This is the core virtue of what the CXA81 MkII does. For any given piece of music you play on it; be it Gregorian chant or speed metal, you might find an amplifier that is slightly better with that track. Where the Cambridge Audio is so effective is that it keeps itself with touching distance of all those different rivals across everything you play. 

Something that is very clever indeed is that this applies every bit as much to the digital board as the analogue inputs. The review sample was tested with an Eversolo DMP-A8 which could be connected over XLR, RCA and USB and the level of performance that the CXA81 showed in comparison to a digital source that costs more than it does was genuinely impressive. 

This testing also showed that the balanced input is more than a gimmick too. If you have a balanced source, the Cambridge manages to sound a little more spacious and natural via this connection than the RCA inputs. The most surprising combination was iFi’s ZEN Phono 3, which has a balanced connection and delivered a performance into the CXA81 MK II that was greater than the sum of its parts. 

Against this, I would describe the performance of the headphone socket to be good rather than great and that the Bluetooth input is decent enough but not at the absolute top of the pile so if you plan to rely heavily on both, the Cambridge might come up short. 

Across the main swathe of inputs though, the Cambridge Audio delivers superb performance and the consistent balance mentioned earlier. In some ways, the performance very closely follows the looks. Every time you think it could be more spectacular, you are reminded that it is a pleasure to live with all the time. 

There’s enough power and headroom to have your neighbours plotting your downfall but it sounds great at lower levels. It can sound brilliant with high res streams from Qobuz but, when you just want to send Spotify to it, that sounds good too. Convenience is not a dirty word and the CXA81 MkII embraces this mantra wholeheartedly.

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