Freed from the yoke of UK manufacturing, Musical Fidelity is now a British design team coupled with Taiwanese manufacturing. This appears to be the only way that good products – at least ones that don't cost as much as a small Mercedes – can be made at competitive prices. And Musical Fidelity has always been competitive.
At first glance, it's hard to pin down whether this is a single system, spread over three boxes; two components with a shared power supply; or three individual components. The regular method of purchase throws some light on this: the X-RAYv8 CD player (sans power supply) is sold separately, while the X-T100 integrated amplifier is supplied with the smaller TRIPLE-X power supply (also available separately), designed to feed the CD player, the amp and a forthcoming X-PLORAv8 tuner.
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From the front, these are three very similar, squared-off boxes, sporting a typical two-tone Musical Fidelity visage. This is neatly understated here – there are none of the blue glowing feet and landing lights of recent high-end Musical Fidelity. The black anodised extruded cases are almost identical too, save for the TRIPLE-X being about two-thirds of the width and depth of the CD and amp boxes.