I guess it's another option you can add to Hypex. But at $1k, doesn't make it a good option though.
I wouldn't say that. I own Hypex FA503's, and Hypex plate amps are a real PITA. The Hypex is a great amp, but everything else about it sucks and the Ashly is much better at. I'll explain
The Hypex is a plate amp, but it is so physically tall that it cannot be used in bookshelf speakers. This makes them limited to floorstanding speakers or giant bookshelf speakers.
It gets worse. The Hypex plate amp isn't airtight, so it requires it's own chamber within the loudspeaker. This eats up an enormous amount of space within the speaker.
The Hypex amp run extremely hot for class D amps, especially at idle. To make things worse their maximum temperature is much lower than other pro amps at 95C when most pro amps can handle 125-150C. Runs hot while having low max temp tolerance AND having to be in a tiny enclosed airspace rather than sharing the entire airspace with the speaker is the worst combo of all worlds and a recipe for reliability disasters. And yes, the Hypex plate amps are quite poor in reliability, this is why you never see them used in pro audio even though they're competitively priced.
But Hypex isn't just a reliability mess, it is quite awful at practical usability too.
The amp takes 4 seconds to get out of standby, which is basically an eternity. Every other audio product except one that I've ever used has instant wake from standby, and the one exception took 0.5 seconds. Imagine the first 4 seconds of your audio cut out every time you listen to your speaker...... The amp very audibly clicks when going in and out of standby as well, again never seen that before, and it gets a bit annoying.
The limiter is useless. It adds audible noises 6-7dB before the limiter is supposed to engage. The amplifier also doesn't overload gracefully. It would occasionally pop and mute rather than soft clip.
There are various bugs within the amp. There used to be bugs that would cause the speaker to blast 0dBFS full scale volume in certain circumstances, but thankfully that's been fixed. The auto input selector is not reliable. The slave unit can often lose sync with the master unit when connected in master/slave digital configuration. The Hypex software has numerous frustrating bugs when trying to use it that I won't detail. Thankfully I only have to use it once to set up.
The Ashly is much smaller, much more reliable, much more usable features (Wi-Fi and network control, advanced limiters, more filters like raised cosine). If you value usability, Ashly is much better than Hypex in every way at the expense of pure amplifier performance. This is what drove me to send Amir the Ashly amp. I need another solution for active speakers because the Hypex is just unacceptable from a usability standpoint.
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