So I recently heard some truly superb Kroma Jovita speakers being driven by an amp from a brand I’d never heard of - Orpheus Lab. The amp was the “A Four 1200”.
The sound quality was really outstanding and I was immensely impressed. I already knew that Kroma makes great speakers so I was of course curious about the amp. I subsequently did some research and go hold of this doc which provided an overview of the topology:
I am told that some of the tech people at Orpheus are ex Goldmund and CHP and my guess is that they have brought some ideas with them . . .
The sound quality was really outstanding and I was immensely impressed. I already knew that Kroma makes great speakers so I was of course curious about the amp. I subsequently did some research and go hold of this doc which provided an overview of the topology:
I am told that some of the tech people at Orpheus are ex Goldmund and CHP and my guess is that they have brought some ideas with them . . .
Amps that have a BJT VAS feeding MOSFET output devices have been around since the 70s. A good one will be 'sonically invisible' IMO. By the late '70s, Peter Baxandall felt that well designed transistor amps were indistinguishable from one another when in their linear regions. From what I can make out, this amp costs around 15,000 Euros. You could buy 4 Benchmark AHB-2s for that price and each one of them would have a better spec on paper. In fact, there are amps from the 70s and 80s that rival this one. I'm not knocking this Swiss amp, but I would think carefully before splashing 15K on it. Even with highly-recognised brands, depreciation on high-end amps is massive. 'Challenger' brands tend to depreciate the most. The classifieds are full of amps that cost 20K a few years back, but now sell for under a quarter of that.
I wasn’t contemplating buying one. I posted about it because the SQ was so impressive. If I thought THD+N always correlated with SQ then I’d buy some Topping B200 monos, but that is not my experience. I actually owned an AHB-2 for a while. I sold it after a few months.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an out and out subjectivist. I believe in science and I totally understand the importance of measuring things. The issue is the significance of what you are measuring. ASR is a misnomer for what Amir does. It should be called Audio Engineering Review . . . .
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an out and out subjectivist. I believe in science and I totally understand the importance of measuring things. The issue is the significance of what you are measuring. ASR is a misnomer for what Amir does. It should be called Audio Engineering Review . . . .
Music itself (especially Rock) typically has a lot of distortion - engineers use it in the same way a chef uses salt and pepper. A room will have deviation that can even be into tens of dB from being flat (I've seen plots for mastering rooms - way better than any show room, and they weren't flat). The very best cartridges struggle to better 0.5% THD @ 1KHz (even ones costing five figures - I've tested them. Higher frequencies have higher THD). Speakers have exponentially more distortion than any amp, as in 0.3% is considered good at SPLs over 90dB. I would respectfully postulate that if the amp is inside its linear region, what you were hearing was the room and the other parts of the system that typically exhibit far greater distortion. SS power amps are the Emperor's New Clothes. It's very easy to pick up on something else in the chain and think it was the amp.
NB - the Topping is a bad example. Over half of them fail inside 12 months. It's a non-starter. Would anyone really be able to A/B/X the difference between a good 70s/80s amp (say, Sony TA-N77ES) vs Benchmark? They would be looking not for the mouse, but a flea on the back of the mouse in terms of difference...(the elephant is the room and speakers)
NB - the Topping is a bad example. Over half of them fail inside 12 months. It's a non-starter. Would anyone really be able to A/B/X the difference between a good 70s/80s amp (say, Sony TA-N77ES) vs Benchmark? They would be looking not for the mouse, but a flea on the back of the mouse in terms of difference...(the elephant is the room and speakers)