On Friday I picked up a CD Player, Headphone amp and power amp which I’d bought on eBay.
These are all from the Sugden Bijou range which was made for a few years in the 00s.
The eventual plan is that they will be in the new study I’m creating out of my old music room. However as that new study is currently work in progress the Sugden Bijou system is in my living room.
I am listening to it with my Sennheiser Reference Gold headphones and my Rogers db101 speakers.
The old system that used to dominate my music room is being sold on eBay at present.
I’m going through that big hi fi thing where you buy new stuff and then you want to listen to every CD/LP whatever through it that you own just to see what they sound like. Care has to be taken not to let this take over all your existence!
My initial impressions are really good. I’m listening mostly using my Sennheiser Reference Gold headphones because of my conversion to headphones over the last year or so. The temporary arrangement in my living room isn’t a great one for the Rogers db101s as they are quite far out from the back wall and they really need to be near it to reinforce their bass output.
The centrepiece of the Sugden Bijou system is the HeadMaster headphone amplifier which doubles up as a pre-amp for the Sugden AmpMaster.
As a headphone amplifier the HeadMaster really is truly superb. I did a lot of searching on the web about the Bijou stuff before my purchase at eBay. There were lots of conflicting reports about it.
I’m finding the amount of energy in the treble is quite new. My old Audio Innovations valve amplifier, now sold, did have very fluid and easy sounding treble, as of course valve amps do, but compared with the Sugden Bijou HeadMaster it in retrospect might have been a bit overly light in touch. I have a CD which includes Renée Fleming singing Straus’s popular Four Last Songs. The orchestra is the Houston Symphony and the conductor is Christoph Eschenbach. Renée Fleming’s singing on the CD is really stunning and the Sugden HeadMaster and CDMaster really show her singing in all its beauty. She has a combination of great finesse with controlled power, and the Sugden stuff is just so good with this kind of material. With the Audio Innovations amplifier I would hear the finesse, but too warm around its edges to really hear her nuancing, and not showing the power in her voice either.

Before I bought the Sugden Bijou stuff I did a lot of searching on the ‘net for info. The item of greatest interest was the HeadMaster and I read lots of comments and bits of reviews over the years. It is amazing how varied the impressions are.
The weirdest is someone in a forum saying that the HeadMaster had some deficiency which meant that it couldn’t play music with electric guitars properly. I do have lots of CDs with electric guitars which, in truth, I hardly ever listen to any more. I got one out, Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop CD, and I was very pleased to hear Jeff Beck’s guitar playing in its full glory.
People want to summarise the sound of the HeadMaster as being either “warm” or “cold”. Both temperatures are put forward as descriptions. I guess it shows how difficult it is to describe sound with words. My old Audio Innovations 500 amplifier was definitely warm but you can’t say that about the HeadMaster or the AmpMaster. I think the sound is quite vivid compared to what I’m used to, I saw someone describe it as “velvety” and I just might be tempted to say that it is a tiny bit velvety but really, most of all it is very neutral.