Love, beauty, passion—these are all ideals that high-end audio manufacturers love to espouse as cornerstones of their brands. It’s marketing BS; hardly anyone is really under the impression that black metallic boxes or room-dominating loudspeaker boxes are pure expressions of beauty, right? Making its worldwide debut in the 4400-square-foot Amsterdam room at the PGE Narodowy stadium, the Lampizator Aphrodite DAC challenges that assumption. So do the Clarisys Aria magnetostatic ribbon speakers, which were also demonstrated here.
The Aphrodite could easily be seen as a rather unexciting looking black box, except for the complement of ten vacuum tubes poking out of its top. It’s Lampizator’s new flagship, boasting four KT88s and one 5U4G rectifier per channel, though the list of tubes one can roll in is too long to reproduce here. Effectively a cost-no-object design, the Aphrodite is set to retail in Poland for €88,000 (not including Poland’s 23 percent value-added tax), or US$102,690 stateside. The design also features custom EI transformers, a four-layer PCB, 20 separate power circuits (!) arranged in a dual-mono configuration, and a digital circuit topology descended from the company’s Horizon series of DACs. A chunky metal remote allows for configuring the device, including saving and accessing up to eight presets.
Lampizator also notes that the DAC offers universal I²S input compatibility, as well as the more usual optical S/PDIF (TosLink), coaxial S/PDIF (RCA), and AES/EBU (XLR) connectivity. A USB Type‑B jack is also present, and the manufacturer says the device is Roon Tested. Outputs are via balanced XLR and single-ended RCA. The Aphrodite’s heavy black case may not live up to its namesake, but the amount of engineering passion poured into this thing more than makes up for it.
The not-dissimilar-looking Neptune balanced line-stage preamplifier, which goes for a much more modest €17,000 (again, excluding VAT) and is based on a bevy of Soviet 6N6P tubes, served as the system’s control center. The new Lampizator Gulfstream music server (€8500, excluding VAT) provided a digital signal to the Aphrodite, which then plugged into the Neptune. A VAC Master 300 iQ tube power amplifier (€45,000) drove the imposing Clarisys Audio Aria speakers (€142,750/pair). All cabling was done by the Spanish firm David Laboga, with the XLR, speaker, and power cables together coming in at around €70,000. The total system cost, complete with the rack and various accessories, was €421,955, including VAT. Translated to the local currency, that’s zł1,797,528.
This was my first encounter with these impressive Swiss panel speakers, which are formed by four separate towers. Each channel is made up of a narrow ribbon speaker that handles the midrange and treble frequencies and a large, almost semicircular tower that manages just the bass. The true bipole design allowed the large Amsterdam room to be arranged in a way that was unique among the large exhibition rooms here at PGE Narodowy—or at any audio show, for that matter. Because sound is emitted equally from the fronts and the backs of the panels, the speakers perfectly bisected the room, and listening spaces were set up on both sides.
Subjectively, the speaker setup created an impressive sense of sonic space, since it could radiate equally in both its front and rear directions. Panel speakers like these are renowned for their ability to start and stop on a dime, and I heard a level of precision and control over the music that is simply not possible with dynamic-driver loudspeakers. The soundstage, though it seemed to occupy only the flat plane of the speakers, extended almost infinitely in all directions. And critically, though much of the music I heard through this system was well-recorded audiophile acoustic stuff, I noted that there was no part of the audioband that stood out more than any other part, and there was no harshness to be heard. My lack of familiarity with the speakers and with the room made it impossible to properly evaluate the brand-new Aphrodite DAC, though I’m certain that if there were any faults with the front-end of the system, these speakers would have shown them—and I didn’t hear any.
Beauty in a form befitting the name of a Greek goddess? Perhaps. The Lampizator, Clarisys, and David Laboga room was another eye-popping exhibition here at Audio Video Show 2025—with an eye-popping price to match. That’s shaping up to be the rule rather than the exception here. I’m excited to see more.
Matt Bonaccio
Contributor, SoundStage!
