New Equipment Auditions Begin

[HiFiFan]

I have a Devialet 170 and a set of Merrill Audio (Hypex NC1200) mono blocks on the way for auditioning.
After that will be either a Hegel Pre/Power combo or Vitus RI-100

I'll post my findings as I go.

[fergus]

Best of luck and enjoy the journey!

[HiFiFan]

Thanks Fergus.

I meant to do this about a year ago but ending up buying a motorcycle and some other stuff instead. What is interesting though is that very few of the amps that were on my original list are part of this round.

My reviews won't be great but I'll post what I can.

[Diapason]

It's an interesting list, really. A lot of leftfield stuff on there (along with the slightly less leftfied Devialet!)

Very interested in your views on the Hypex monos. As time goes on I feel more and more that I'd like a good digital amp for certain times, as I think they do some things brilliantly.

[Fran]

Like the others mentioned, I'm interested to hear how you get on....



Fran

[Ivor]

yeap, these are the threads I really enjoy! Living the hifi life vicariously through others buying new stuff!

[jkeny]

yeap, these are the threads I really enjoy! Living the hifi life vicariously through others buying new stuff!

What? You renegade, I thought you only hung out on the CA threads?

Yes, good collection of amps there - would be interested in a comparison

[Sligolad]

Interested to hear how the Hypex mono blocks work out, had planned for a solid state amp purchase this year with my eye on Hypex options and a Modwright amp as the other option after hearing one last year.

Never pushed the button with all that has been going on with CA, maybe next year once I get a final build finalised on the front end.
Cheers, Pearse.

[HiFiFan]

I have good expectations for the Hypex. At RMAF I heard them in 4 different rooms with 3 different manufacturers using them. Reviews have been very good and I have included a snippet from dagogo RMAF coverage below. I agree with the snippet. Imaging was superb and on Patricia Barbers “Ode to Billy Joe” the finger snaps were just incredible. We also had a lot of fun with James Blake retrograde and “limit to your love”, loads of low frequency stuff.
Inspired by some previous post by Si some months back I built an amp using the NC400 modules, I would say good and very very well worth the OEM cost but not the level of improvement I was looking for. It will be interesting to see if the NC1200s can do it.

“Channel D / Merrill Audio / TAD
Merrill Wettasinghe of Merrill Audio and Rob Robinson of Channel D were on hand. Rob was “spinning” some excellent-sounding “Pure Vinyl.” This room overall was a real treat to the ears. The system included the superb Merrill Audio Veritas monoblocks (which I reviewed earlier this year), the TAD Evolution 1 speakers, and ANAP X1 cables also by Merrill Audio. The amplifiers did a wonderful job on the TAD’s. The sound in the room was richly detailed with superb bass control and nicely layered images. The Veritas amplifiers clearly demonstrated the same sort of magic on the TAD’s as they did on my Eficion 300’s. Also interesting to note is fact that the Channel D front-end was quite impressive. On several occasions I found it very obvious when the digitized vinyl was recorded from different turntable/cartridge combination! That speaks highly as to the quality of the Channel D Pure Vinyl process. This was one of my favorite rooms. (photos coming)"

[HiFiFan]

I received the Merrill Audio (Hypex NC1200) mono blocks yesterday. These are a demo unit so are well broken in. These guys are heavy, really well put together and very nicely packaged. I’ll post a proper review after a week or two but a few hours listening to them last night was a pure pleasure. I can 100% say that they are orders of magnitude better than my ICEPower 1000ASP mono blocks and considerably better than the Hypex NC400s.

There was no critical listening last night just a rotation through some favourite songs. Many songs didn’t reveal more detail but a few did and there was certainly a few holy c... moments. While a few tracks showed little or no dramatic differences they all just sounded better, more musical as a whole. There is just better imaging, separation, air and decay

On some tracks the sound was just huge, Ray LaMontagne and Passenger were really good examples of this. I just recently saw Hugh Cornwell (ex Stranglers) in a small intimate venue in San Francisco (great gig) and it was like that experience again with a few of the songs we played.

Things that stood out were as follows:
Excellent bass performance coupled with great mid-range and high frequencies. The NC400 had aspects of all this but the bass was nowhere near as good. For example, there is huge bass on Lana Del Rays Video Games. The NC400s could not reproduce it but the Merrill’s did it better than any amp I have heard recently. On really bass heavy songs like the work of James Blake, Angel Haze etc. the system just rocked.

What was really impressive is how it handled complex musical pieces (maybe this isn’t the right terminology as I haven’t yet tried any classical or opera). What I mean by this is there are a few songs we listen to that in parts have a lot going on but on the old amps these passages sounded a little more like noise and less like music, all in all indistinct. With the Merrill’s they became musical and you could distinguish each piece including stuff we never heard before. One example of this is from Florence and the Machine’s What the Water Gave Me, another is at the end of 9 Crimes by Damien Rice.

One of my favourite songs is Goodbye from Diana Reeves. She hits a note towards the end of the song that just never sounded right before in my system but was smack on with the Merrills. In addition the amps just brought out the background music much better making it a better sound over all.

Listening to the live version of Poison and Wine from The Civil Wars was just a revelation. The timbre, passion, pace it was the first time I had an emotional response to the song.

A fair amount of stuff we listen to has backing vocals, The Frames, Swell Season, Fleetwood Mac, ... and the Merrill’s really separated those out and you could hear for example that there was three distinct vocals going as opposed to some harmony. It still sounded like a harmony just better than it was before.
The amps are meant to be sensitive to the power cords used and I will be trying them with three different sets.