maty
Major Contributor
30 dB is not a randomly chosen number. For some it mark a border, in class A and AB. Class D is other world.
Typical speaker connections have very poor contact area because of the difference between ideal and actual real manufacture. Spade lugs are rarely, if ever parallel and flat and are probably the worst. Banana are vey plug dependant, speakon were sensibly engineered to work properly when manufactured using normal methods.Which ones, the bad ones or the good ones? The good ones used SpeakOn. The bad ones used banana jacks with screw terminals. Removing the terminal and going with bare wire produced 2 dB better performance. I have solid brass locking banana jacks coming to test to see if it resolves this issue.
30 dB is not a randomly chosen number. For some it mark a border, in class A and AB. Class D is other world.
Wait, are you telling me that audiophiles recommending space connectors over bananas due to better contact actually have a point?I lost about 3 dB of performance using the banana jacks due to less secure connect there.
In one of their other reviews, in comparison of the Benchmark DAC with another DAC, the reviewer said the Benchmark amp got rid of the sound of church walls in the recording...Interesting thing about Stereophile is they still went on to praise some other pieces of audiophile jewelry at 100K without reference to the Benchmark.
In one of their other reviews, in comparison of the Benchmark DAC with another DAC, the reviewer said the Benchmark amp got rid of the sound of church walls in the recording...
If Benchmark made it five times the sized and at a weight that required and sack barrow to move it, they would probably sell more
I don't know about volume discounts but they have had specials around show time, IIRC (and it's been two years) they did for AES a couple of years ago.Anyone know if there is a volume discount? I just checked and I sent them an email a couple of months ago but never heard back. Earthlink wacked out their antispam scheme around then and it's still somewhat messed up, sending emails to spam even though they are on my contact list, so Benchmark may have responded but it got trashed. Figured I'd check here before pinging them again.
When I ordered mine a couple of three weeks ago, there was an order backlog. My guess is that they build them as fast as they can, but can't match current demand. So you wait a week or two. The good news is, you get a factory fresh one when it arrives. Any other 'boutique high end' manufacturer would see this situation as an opportunity to jack the price up 20 or 30 percent. I laugh when I read about super expensive gear being touted by the high end press as 'a bargain' that 'blows away' everything else. In this case it is true. For the price, for any price, there's really nothing that touches it. And they sell it a lot cheaper than the usual high end thing.Anyone know if there is a volume discount? I just checked and I sent them an email a couple of months ago but never heard back. Earthlink wacked out their antispam scheme around then and it's still somewhat messed up, sending emails to spam even though they are on my contact list, so Benchmark may have responded but it got trashed. Figured I'd check here before pinging them again.
I have never seen an amp that measures this way. I don't know that anybody has. It isn't the first amplifier to use feedforward -- indeed, John Siau points out that feedforward is actually an older technology than negative feedback -- but it's rare in doing so.Every body is talking about this excellent amp, and it is getting quite a buzz, deservedly so.
When you find this level of performance, as others wrote, you're set for life.
To all the experts and veteran audio engineers at this forum I ask (because I haven't heard of anything similar before): Do any of you have encountered an amp with this kind of benchmark results? My guess is that indeed, there may be a few others, but they'd be multiple times costlier and heavier than this AHB2 amp.
Yep, the AHB2 is a feedforward design. This has a number of benefits including the fact that they can use a relatively low bias while maintaining Class A performance throughout the power range.I know what you're talking about but all that numers are from high negative feedback probably. You can not get it with 30dB or less global feedback, only with local negative feedback. Or maybe feed-forward feedback...
I had an ASR emitter, three boxes and huge silver connecting cables, like an octopus, Benchmark is certainly smaller and lighter and less expensive.Better than ASR Emitter that i have been eyeballing as my endgame amp...
Thanks for saving +10k for me
Color me impressed.
Also nice to see a currently available reasonably priced product that puts paid to the hype, surrounding Hypex. "Ncore® is the first Class-D amplifier not just to nudge the best linear amplifiers, but to surpass them in every aspect relevant to sound quality."
I had an ASR emitter, three boxes and huge silver connecting cables, like an octopus, Benchmark is certainly smaller and lighter and less expensive.
Keith