Tech Talk: Gold Note

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hi-fi+ Staff
Oct 05, 2025

You might reasonably ask how Gold Note, a company still best known for its turntables, turned its hand to the HP-10 and the technical wizardry it contains. Dig a little deeper into how the HP-10 works, and this makes a little more sense, although, if anything, it makes the HP-10 even cleverer than you might at first assume. It began as an after-hours development project of senior engineer Giovanni Rialti. As the project progressed, additional resources were brought in to evaluate and incrementally improve the audio performance, including our CEO, Maurizio Aterini, who spent hundreds of hours conducting listening tests.

The amplification section is derived from a study on high-end power amplification that the company has been undertaking as part of its wider product development in the field of high-end amplifiers. The HP-10 is a fully dual-mono design that makes use of components derived from that research, including single-sealed relays of both traditional and reed types. Gain transistors have been selected to minimise NFB values. The bias is controlled by quad-tracking circuitry.

Quad-tracking

A key element of the brief was to be able to drive any headphone on the market except electrostatics (and don’t worry, Gold Note has plans in that direction too). While some of the gain settings feel like overkill in the context of the Focals the company uses for testing, the idea is that the Gold Note has the reserves available to handle even the stiffest of planar magnetic designs on the market. The chances are that most owners will never use the gain boost, but a subset of users will be extremely grateful that it is there.

Gold Note’s best practices also influence some aspects of the design in other areas. This includes the variable damping factor technology that the company has been developing for over 10 years. The feature evolved from the desire to offer possibilities to customise the listening experience (that have also resulted in the development of standalone valve buffer units). It then evolved to embody the Gold Note philosophy: to provide a flexible and high-performance audio reproduction tool. The ability to adjust the damping factor helps broaden the number of devices that the amp will pair with, and the principle is the same for headphones.

Beyond casual glances

Something else that can be missed if you casually glance at the HP-10 is that all of the extensive selection of adjustments are incremented in the analogue domain. The menu-driven interface at the front is the only part of the process that is digital. Even in the case of the HP-10 Deluxe, with its onboard decoding, the digital-to-analogue conversion takes place beforehand, and adjustments are made to the signal from there. There are no DSPs or ADCs – it’s all good, discrete components and precise engineering. The signal audio is entirely analogue, and all the adjustments are implemented in the analogue domain. This is how the standard HP-10 can still implement the functionality that it does with only analogue connections on the back.

Some of these adjustments genuinely warrant the term unique. Gold Note’s crossfeed implementation differs from many rivals, which tend to offer a varying degree of information from the full bandwidth being fed from one channel into another. Instead, it focuses on allowing one or more parts of the frequency to be fed into the other channel rather than increasing the amount of information being sent across. This also applies to the Harman Curve adjustment, which is broken down into different parts of the frequency response that can be summed together to give the whole curve. This is topped off with the ‘Superflat’ function designed to linearise the high-frequency response.

No ‘one size fits all’

Gold Note’s position on the ‘correct’ settings for the plethora of adjustable options on the HP-10 is refreshingly candid. Tommaso Dolfi, Gold Note’s Marketing Manager, notes;

“We believe that there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to audio. Some audiophiles love to see a 3D soundstage in front of their eyes, others crave the feeling of being surrounded by the music or enjoy the classic headphone experience. The goal of what we do as a manufacturer is to create components that bring audiophiles a little closer to the moment when music becomes magic. Spatial Audio, EQs, and Room Correction can all prove to be valid technologies when they enable audiophiles to approach their ideal experience. Part of the beauty of what we do is knowing that there are countless ways to achieve there desired result, and that each technology will satisfy a specific group of audiophiles, but not all of them. So we embrace advancements in these fields as long as they don’t turn into marketing or gimmicky tricks.”

Modular

The design of the HP-10 is also entirely modular. This allows for upgrades to be purchased by replacing or adding boards. While there are no updates planned at the moment (hardly a terrible state of affairs given the extensive functionality already present), an essential aspect is the future-proofing of the product, which helps to keep it relevant for as long as possible. The presence of the external PSU also gives the HP-10 more potential for upgrades, allowing the operation to be switched from a switching PSU to a linear one that incorporates components too large to fit in the HP-10 chassis.

The clever part is that once you have applied the settings that work for you, the HP-10 allows you to focus more effectively on the material. It can be very easy to build devices as comprehensive as the HP-10 and have them become something of an ‘effects box,’ where you hear the differences they make to the signal. Gold Note has ensured that the HP-10’s functionality is a means to a brilliant end rather than a distraction. Combined with the vast potential gain, you have an enormously flexible headphone amp.