CONSTELLATION AUDIO Pictor/Taurus

Constellation Audio Pictor:

The Pictor preamplifier is a dual-mono fully balanced design, based on FETs, with a separate outboard power supply, hence a two-box solution. If you put these two in one chassis then you essentially end up with Constellation Audio Inspiration 1.0 preamplifier.

The preamp can be either controlled via its decent touch-screen display (inky black on white) or with the help of small buttons that are hidden underneath the protruding part of the fascia and two knobs on the sides of the display that take care of volume and balance. The controllable parameters include powering on/off and stand-by, stereo balance, signal polarity, mute, theater bypass, display brightness, input sensitivity, and input selection. I don’t really know why designers decided to place the balance knob at such a prominent location as – if ever needed – it is set and forgotten. I would prefer to have the input selector on the fascia. The volume is stepped by 0.5dB in an attenuator fashion, so it shows attenuation rather than gain.

The external power supply connects to the main unit with 3 supplied umbilical cables and employs two R-core transformers for analogue circuits and an El-type transformer to power control circuits.

The Pictor offers 6 inputs (3xXLR, 3xRCA) and 4 outputs (2xXLR, 2xRCA) per channel. There is no phono and headphone preamp, nor a DAC. Although the Pictor has an USB on its rear panel, it is only for service purposes.

Constellation Audio Taurus stereo:

In specifications the Taurus is rated at 250W into 8ohm and 500W into 4ohm loads. I found interesting that Paul Miller (hifinews.com) measured the Taurus to clip at 655W into 4 ohms, so the power amplifier is largely underspecified. I cannot imagine loudspeakers that the Constellation Audio would fail to drive.

All Constellation amplifiers are built around the same “quasi-complementary” bridged module that uses a combination of P-Mosfets and N-Mosfets in a differential mode. Each module is 125W and has +14dB gain, several modules are employed depending on the type of amplifier.

Although the internal layouts are not overly complicated and look a bit messy for high-end standards, the chassis of all the devices are beautifully made from thick aluminum panels that should contribute blocking EM smog coming from outside.

The Taurus has only one pair of speaker terminals with + and – legs spaced quite apart so make sure that your speaker cable can reach the nuts. Also Constellation Audio warns about using speaker-level connection of subwoofers because the Taurus’ balanced bridged design which is likely to be incompatible with grounding scheme of a powered sub and may result into damaging the Taurus. The manual provides guidance on how to check whether it is safe or not to use the sub’s speaker-level inputs. If not, line-level inputs are recommended.

There is no obvious POWER button on the Taurus – you need to press the left side of the bar on the amplifier’s fascia to initiate start up. The left side of the bar mutes the signal. There is another MUTE toggle switch at the rear which comes handy if you need to reconnect cables.

No doubt that the Pictor and the Taurus are optimized to work in tandem, plus they are optimized to look as a tandem too. The preamplifier should be ideally connected to the Taurus (or any other Constellation Audio power amp) via one of the XLR outputs to the power amp’s DIRECT input. This way the gain stage of the power amplifier is bypassed which should be a purer path for audio signal. If you use XLR inputs on the Taurus, then J-FET input stage is added to the audio path.