Dan D'Agostino's retro cool Pendulum amp comes with a "surprisingly affordable" price
Surprisingly affordable by D'Agostino's standards, anyway


Quick Summary
The new Dan D'Agostino amplifier is priced very aggressively to make the brand accessible to new customers.
UK prices start at £18,000 and it's available to order now.
There are two things I know about legendary audio system maker Dan D'Agostino. First, he makes beautiful audiophile products, and second, I'll never, ever be able to afford any of them.
But while the new and predictably gorgeous Pendulum Integrated Amplifier is still reassuringly expensive, it's the most affordable Dan D'Agostino amplifier yet.
Let's start with the price tag. Many Dan D'Agostino products are in the Rolls-Royce-esque "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" category, and the ones with listed prices range from around £29,000 to just shy of £55,000.
So by comparison, the Pendulum is a bargain. Its UK price starts at just £18,000 (about AU$37,390), slightly more than the US price of $15,000.
That's still way beyond my budget, but it makes D'Agostino's latest amp available to many more music fans.
This is quite possibly the best-looking remote control of any audio product
D'Agostino Pendulum Integrated Amplifier: key features
The Pendulum is a new product line for D'Agostino, sitting outside its three main product ranges. According to the brand, it's "designed to take D’Agostino’s revered technologies and design principles to a broader high-end audience", and "clever design choices" mean a lower price without compromising on performance or desirability.
The central, circular LCD display echoes the analogue meters of D'Agostino's best-known amps, and it's surrounded by sturdy aluminium casework with copper trim.
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The design is also echoed in, what I'm sure is. the best-looking remote control that's ever shipped with an audio product.
The Pendulum’s base model has four line-level analogue inputs (three balanced stereo XLR, plus one stereo RCA). You can add a factory fitted MC phono stage for £1,150, and there's also a £2,850 digital module that adds a hi-res streaming DAC with HDMI, optical, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity.
Power is rated at 120W per channel into 8 ohms and 240W per channel into 4. And the firm promises that "sonically, the Pendulum is every bit a D’Agostino – full-scale, wide-bandwidth power and poise, maintaining an unerring grip on the music whilst delivering its emotional impact in full effect."
The Dan D'Agostino Pendulum Integrated Amplifier is available to order now.
Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).
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