CORONA LINE MBL C51 INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER
The system’s heart or motor, the amplifier, has a special role to play as it carefully “amplifies” the delicate musical signal and controls the loudspeaker, enabling all pieces of musical information to be bundled into a meaningful whole. The C51 provides the strong-hearted foundation of a simpler system by carefully combining the functions of the preamp and amplifier in one elegant chassis. No compromises here, discrete components fill the input section, our trail-blazing LASA technology provides a powerful and efficient amplifier…MBL to its core. For optimum channel separation and a distinct, true-to-life musical image, we have crafted the input stages from carefully selected discrete components. Full listening pleasure in half the space.

THE MISSION WAS TO ACHIEVE PERFECT SYMBIOSIS
An ideal fusion of high end sound with an innovative design concept. MBL’s teams of developers and designers worked hand in hand in engineering the concept and have broken fresh ground. The outcome is now a new range of superb high quality high end audio - the MBL Corona Line.The Corona Line’s minimalist design is a new byword for restrained understatement combined with classical elegance which makes it the perfect match for almost any type of room.

THE CORONA LINE TAKES ITS NAME FROM
The 40mm button shaped like the MBL logo and mounted on the upper side in a corona of light. This signature button serves to regulate the brightness of the display. All products in the range have been carefully coordinated to complement one another and when taken together as a single family unit radiate an atmosphere of truly captivating serenity.The Corona Line hasn’t just broken the mould in design terms alone; technically speaking too this new product line sets new standards. The outer solid aluminium casing contains a second casing of reinforced steel which screens off the electronics in magnetically shielded slots with full electrical isolation of the power supplies units and transformers.

The CD player features a state of the art high quality Slot drive and digital RCA and Toslink inputs as well as a native USB dock for CD audio data. A novel intelligent MBL SmartLink network enables the devices to talk to one another. This means that all associated input signals are controlled by the Pre-Amplifi er or Integrated Amplifi er and a simple touch of the button on a device or the remote control is all that you need to put the whole Corona system on standby.

The power consumption is then under 1 VA (Green Standby). The MBL Corona Line is a fully rounded statement of our proven expertise in audio engineering and design – a consummate fusion of perfect acoustics and design. A truly alluring entry to the world of high end audio.

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" When a company produces what is arguably the premiere omnidirectional loudspeaker in the world, as MBL does with its Radialstrahler range, it doesn’t take a big leap to assume it knows a little something about measuring acoustic space. I think the main issue that listening to the C51 provoked in me was the way it integrated individual criteria—frequency, imaging, dynamics, transients—weaving them together into a seamless tapestry of reproduced sound. Every image found a home within the full context of the recording. At a concert, we experience this context first, the entirety of the performance with our eyes as well as our ears. But back at home we tend to focus on the more granular. We begin breaking down the recording into component pieces. Some of this is provoked by the recording process itself, but another part of it goes to an amp’s resolution and transparency—its retrieval power, if you will.

The C51 has the ability to take all the carved up segments from a recording and reattach them in a way that makes the result indistinguishable from the original. Many times I’ve listened to the intro to Audra McDonald’s “Lay Down Your Head” [Nonesuch] for the delicate opening harp figure and the chamber group that joins in shortly thereafter, but only a handful of amps, including the C51, allow me to hear the entirety of the immersive space and image relationships that this recording offers. Even on a typical pop recording like Leonard Cohen’s “Going Home” [Sony Music], I could hear the angelic backing chorus as it wafted through the black acoustic space beside Cohen’s dark baritone and mingled with a calliope-like whistle, a vamping piano pad, and a tick of percussive accent in a way that shamed the multitrack artifice of many of today’s other recording studios.

At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter what kind of prism you use to judge the C51. It has more power reserves than the majority of audiophiles will ever need. It’s impeccably proportioned and lavishly appointed. Its musicality, needless to say, is first-rate. Separates may continue to hold sway at the more esoteric levels of the high end, but I’d gladly put the mbl C51 head-to-head with any of them. And let’s see who owes whom an apology. Corona may be entry-level for MBL, but it’s one world-class, sexy beast in my book."  - Absolute Sound

THE ABSOLUTE SOUND “EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARD 2015″ 27. FEBRUARY 2015
The magazine “The Absloute Sound” awarded the following 8 MBL products with the Editors’ Choice Award 2015:

REFERENCE LINE: mbl 101 E MKII, mbl 101 X-treme, mbl 6010 D
CORONA LINE: mbl 120, mbl C51, mbl C11, mbl C21, mbl C31