Apollon Hypex NC2K Amplifier Teardown

[March Audio]

He is not at all sincere. When he is a customer, he would never in a million years settle for what he is asking us to settle for. Did he build his amps out of cheap plastic or expensive machined aluminum? The latter, right? Why didn't he do an analysis and see if a plastic box would fit the purpose? Answer is that he wants his customers to think they are getting a high-end product even though the benefit to them may be zero. Yet he argues with us on better quality capacitors?

I find that offensive Amir. If someone said that to you you would threaten them with a ban. Again your personal comments betray your inability to answer the subject in hand and with respect I dont think it reflects well on you.

I have used Hypex amps for years prior to being an OEM customer of theirs. I have no issue with the quality.

I want customers to believe they are getting a good quality, good performing product at a good price. No one thinks this is high end, least of all me. As has been pointed out in here and other threads by other members, our prices are barely above that of DIY builds.

If my intent was as you suggest I would be charging Bryston prices, or perhaps Mark Levinson prices. Also I am actually quite conspicuous amongst the range of Hypex OEM manufacturers by not selling unnecessary bling (discrete buffers etc).

BTW how much was your ML amp? $50k? Does it perform any better than a Hypex? Why didnt they put it in a plastic box???? Do you have a failed premium brand cap in your ML dac? How much was your dac? So where do your ML products fit on the scale of "impression of high end v actual benefit"?

 

[samsa]

Without an estimate of the MTBF of the caps in these Hypex modules (as opposed to some other, irrelevant, use-case), this discussion is senseless.

I'm willing to wager that a significant fraction of the readership of this forum have used or are currently using Hypex-based amplifiers. Let's collect some data.

1. How long have you owned a Hypex-based amp?
2. During that time, have you had a capacitor fail?
3. If so, how long after purchase was the failure?

Capacitor failure is a Poisson process. If enough people own these modules, even if the MTBF is very long, a few people will have seen a failure by now. Once you know the distribution of failures, then you can estimate the MTBF.

Then we can have a discussion.

Before then, @restorer-john, @March Audio and @amirm as simply wasting time.

I'll start the ball rolling:

• I've own an NC252MP module for a year. No capacitor failures in that time.

 

[March Audio]

You must think there will be a lot of failures then to justify that kind of premium for warranty. Indeed simple math would show that you think your amp will break on average 5 times during that 20 years. So 4 years of average lifetime....

Amir, come on. No one suggested it was the cost of the warranty, or the sole reason they charge that much. Where did you get that from?????

 

[hege]

Since you can find a bazillion forum posts of failed Hypex plate amps out there, but generally these separate builds seems ok, perhaps that points out that heat is a factor? Of course the plate amp models usually use smaller PSUs etc. Both my broken PSC2.400 run veery hot..

Honestly I couldn't care less if it's a capacitor issue or whatnot. There's too many fault reports out there (for plate amps, even FA-series I see comments like "4 out of 6 in warranty"), regardless of reason.

 

[March Audio]

Without an estimate of the MTBF of the caps in these Hypex modules (as opposed to some other, irrelevant, use-case), this discussion is senseless.

I'm willing to wager that a significant fraction of the readership of this forum have used or are currently using Hypex-based amplifiers. Let's collect some data.

1. How long have you owned a Hypex-based amp?
2. During that time, have you had a capacitor fail?
3. If so, how long after purchase was the failure?

Capacitor failure is a Poisson process. If enough people own these modules, even if the MTBF is very long, a few people will have seen a failure by now. Once you know the distribution of failures, then you can estimate the MTBF.

Then we can have a discussion.

Before then, @restorer-john, @March Audio and @amirm as simply wasting time.

I'll start the ball rolling:

• I've own an NC252MP module for a year. No capacitor failures in that time.

I have owned a specific NC252 (amongst other modules) for 5 years (IIRC need to check) no cap fails.

Not sure the small sample we will get from this thread is going to tell us much though.

Sorry to post it again but this is the info from @DS23MAN

To clarify my position, I am an external consultant at Hypex for several years and do a lot of beta testing on their products.

The problem in this discussion is mainly the reliabity of Suscon cap's, well I can't find any proof on the net they are shit.

Hypex is pooping out amp modules and smps modules in such quantaties that a problem would show directly. To be frankly, if you produce more than 100.000 modules a year and 1 person can keep up the warranty claims ( and failure research) (and repair)......

 

[Laserjock]

~10-15 year warranty repair/and or replacement for cap only failure.

*(Since they’re not an issue)

 

[Massimo]

It's a hypocritical position, but he's so dug in and committed now, any form of acknowledgment, tacit agreement, letalone capitulation, is most unlikely.

I would be interested to know how many caps you have replaced in Hypex modules?

 

[samsa]

Since you can find a bazillion forum posts of failed Hypex plate amps out there,

For the purpose at hand, just knowing about the failures tells you nothing. It's just as important to know how many units don't fail.

but generally these separate builds seems ok, perhaps that points out that heat is a factor?

The lifetime decreases exponentially with the operating temperature. So, yeah.

Honestly I couldn't care less if it's a capacitor issue or whatnot. There's too many fault reports out there (for plate amps, even FA-series I see comments like "4 out of 6 in warranty"), regardless of reason.

This thread is explicitly about power amps. Which, as seems to be universally acknowledged, run very cool (certainly compared to class-A or class-AB).

Of course, if it's the case that the same manufacturer produces crappy, failure prone plate amps, that might be a reason to be concerned about their power amp modules too ...

 

[hege]

For the purpose at hand, just knowing about the failures tells you nothing. It's just as important to know how many units don't fail.

For the purpose or not, as a consumer I kind of disagree. If there's enough faults out there, it doesn't exactly raise my confidence. There will be also many faults that don't end up in a forum post. But aside from the embarassing back-and-forth between some, this thread has been very informative, for example the Icepower fault rates was good info.

 

[DDF]

Took another look at my Hypex power supply (SMPS1200) that died (Hypex suspected caps), and it used Samwha caps.

These don't even make Tom's Hardware's 4th tier. They seem to have a rep for going "poof" in LCD's.

Despite all the rending of garments over Su'scon, they're a design improvement over initial production.

 

[Blumlein 88]

For the purpose at hand, just knowing about the failures tells you nothing. It's just as important to know how many units don't fail.



The lifetime decreases exponentially with the operating temperature. So, yeah.



This thread is explicitly about power amps. Which, as seems to be universally acknowledged, run very cool (certainly compared to class-A or class-AB).

Of course, if it's the case that the same manufacturer produces crappy, failure prone plate amps, that might be a reason to be concerned about their power amp modules too ...

Yes this exponential factor is a big deal. I've some Wyred4Sound ST500 power amps which have been powered up 11 years now. Most of their life they were powering some big Soundlab ESL's which are woefully inefficient. They are in my AV rig currently. They've not exploded their caps yet. Due to the barely above room temperature conditions in which they exist I'm not too worried.

 

[DS23MAN]

Nonsense. No one is damaging the reputation. We are telling you what we expect in premium products. We are asking for what is common to ask for in any proper engineering environment as I showed you in Dave Jones video. Your beef should be with Hypex that this may become a sales issue for you for some segment of your market.

It was not a cap failure in this video!

 

[amirm]

It was not a cap failure in this video!

Yeh, the the goop got it before the caps did....

 

[amirm]

It was not a cap failure in this video!

And oh, the caps do fail in those KRK speakers: https://www.gearslutz.com/board/geekslutz-forum/731238-krk-rokit-5-faint-buzz-bad-capacitor.html

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I've been dealing with a faint buzz in both of my original KRK Rokit 5's for quite some time now. Different houses, power conditioners, different power cables, etc didn't solve it. The buzz is there as soon as they're powered on and doesn't change with the volume control or whether or not anything is plugged into the audio input speaker.
So, undoubtedly, the noise originates from within the speaker itself.
I ran across another guy online who had a really loud, bad buzz in his. It turned out to be an obviously leaking capacitor.

Another responds to him:
That bulging cap definitely needs replacing.
With a quality Low ESR cap.
Get one with a higher voltage rating if you can fit it.

Poster later:

I just finished replacing those caps with higher voltage replacements (50 vs the old 35).
Got them all put back together and... the buzz is gone!!!

 

[Thomas savage]

I'm thinking we should try and save some money and do a popcorn group buy , who's in ?

 

[March Audio]

I'm thinking we should try and save some money and do a popcorn group buy , who's in ?

I think (now it has calmed down a bit) it is a very interesting and valuable topic to investigate. As ASR has done with previous questions such as the merit of op amp rolling. Lets separate the fact from fiction, personal opinion v actual data.

 

[RayDunzl]

*puts a bag of microwave popcorn in for 2 minutes and 10 seconds...

poppety-pop-pop-pop

 

[DS23MAN]

And oh, the caps do fail in those KRK speakers: https://www.gearslutz.com/board/geekslutz-forum/731238-krk-rokit-5-faint-buzz-bad-capacitor.html

----------
I've been dealing with a faint buzz in both of my original KRK Rokit 5's for quite some time now. Different houses, power conditioners, different power cables, etc didn't solve it. The buzz is there as soon as they're powered on and doesn't change with the volume control or whether or not anything is plugged into the audio input speaker.
So, undoubtedly, the noise originates from within the speaker itself.
I ran across another guy online who had a really loud, bad buzz in his. It turned out to be an obviously leaking capacitor.

Another responds to him:
That bulging cap definitely needs replacing.
With a quality Low ESR cap.
Get one with a higher voltage rating if you can fit it.

Poster later:

I just finished replacing those caps with higher voltage replacements (50 vs the old 35).
Got them all put back together and... the buzz is gone!!!

What do you expect with a 200 dollar speaker? You can clearly see very low grade enginering, cheap single sided pertinax pcb produced in a low grade china factory.

 

[DS23MAN]

https://www.dfrsolutions.com/hubfs/Resources/services/Long-Term-Storage-of-Al-E-Capacitors.pdf

 

[Vasr]

The irony is if hypothetically this thread had none of the March Audio posts of outrage against John's perceived attempts to malign hypex amps and the responses to him (hypothetical, not saying anything should be removed to prevent another perceived slight), this cap thing would be a long-forgotten thing just like it was with NAD.

John would have expressed his opinion that it should have had better caps for the price, gathered a few likes and everybody would have moved on to drooling over the power specs.

No sales to Hypex amps would have been lost to anyone who would actually consider buying one, Apollon Audio's professional conduct and responses would still have gathered a few customers in the future which is unaffected by this Aussie mating ritual between John and March Audio.

All this tedious fuming and stomping has just made readers more aware of the cap issue who will likely more deeply associate Hypex with poorer rated caps (whether sufficient or not) and a discussed issue whenever another Hypex amp is torn down and people on the fence about Purifi vs Hypex will likely tend towards the former with "better caps" and a few likely (some who have expessed this) would reconsider doing business with March Audio.