Bantam / Amptastic vs traditional amplifiers

[Tim]

Well all I can say as a very contented owner of an Amptastic Mini-T is that from my experience they need careful matching and don't expect to pop the knob up too far, or they can clip. BUT, get the right speakers and the sound per pound is exceptional. I have one for near field listening at my PC and they are perfect.

I have tried a Mini-T with the following;

• Celestion 5 - very good pairing.
• Celestion DL6 - not so good, dull and lifeless.
• Harbeth SHL5 - definitely not a match made in heaven. The Harbeths sounded muffled, bass was missing and vocals and piano (a good test) were unnatural. The magical Harbeth mid-range was absent with a Mini-T.
• Q Acoustics 2010i - probably the best pairing, extremely musical.

I use one everyday now with my Celestion 5's, fed from an HRT Music Streamer II+ DAC and only baulked at buying the 2010i's, as the difference is marginal and I intend on buying some Harbeth P3ESR's for near field listening with my QUAD 405-2, so the 2010i's would only have been a temporary purchase, so not worth the outlay - I bought the Celestion 5's from eBay for 14 quid and with the above DAC, playing FLAC files from JRiver it sounds way better than it ought to.

Pair them well and they are a very good buy and you can upgrade the PSU for improved performance.

[selby]

Aren't the hypex based amps bloody expensive though?

[r100]

yes but 350 pounds should be ok for 2 ucd180hg modules and a power supply.. you will have to assemble it though ;-)

i'd say it is closer to the nva than any t amp will ever be,... especially at higher volumes..

but i must admit that for the low price (and at lowish volumes) t amps are quite astonishing

[selby]

Interesting. I've looked at Hypex in the past but the NC400 was expensive, the UCD180 is reasonable. I've just emailed Hypex a load of questions...

[r100]

hi, did ya get any feedback from the people @ hypex ?

[selby]

They did, very helpful. From further investigation though I've decided to hold back on going down the Hypex route until I could afford a decent NC400 setup.

[r100]

good choice.. i'm selling my 180's to do the same .. they sound great but i need a little more power to drive the kefs

[nat8808]

(hypex is "class D" not "digital")

Yeah, a little annoying (in a pedantic way) that people call Class-D digital - it's analogue! D doesn't stand for Digital any more than A in Class-A stands for Analogue or B in Class-B stands for Broken (I guess AB meaning Broken Analogue with a little poetic licence?)

Nelson Pass explained it briefly in the interview with him, linked on this forum somewhere.

[nat8808]

They did, very helpful. From further investigation though I've decided to hold back on going down the Hypex route until I could afford a decent NC400 setup.

Save up and keep an eye out on DIY website classifieds or all the ebays (multi-country). Saw a pair of nCore 400 with 600 PSUs in a good quality case for about £1000 which isn't too bad considering new cost, was on Italian Ebay/diyaudio.com . Seems to be the ball park for people who have already moved on from their nCores.

Would love to try a set..