Justin & Jerry's Hifi Blog

[Macca]

You can send the losing Krell to me Jerry, I'll give it a good home.

[jandl100]

You can send the losing Krell to me Jerry, I'll give it a good home.

Noooo, both are staying for a while.

I've only had them a couple of weeks, so still learning what they both can do.
It only takes a minute or so to swap between them - although the warm up period of the Crayon is a pain. The best thing is probably to swap the cables to the Crayon last thing at night and have it ready for action for the following day.

[Macca]

Okay, when you are ready to move it on you know where I am.

[Firebottle]

And then, after a few hours of being powered up, the Crayon starts to stretch its legs - and seemingly quite suddenly the Crayon opens up in both 3D imaging and tonal texture.


I suspect the Crayon is the best amp I have owned so far.

Very interesting result Jerry and quite some statement at the end

Excellent stuff. AoS would be a duller place without a few inveterate box swappers

[jandl100]

The Crayon amp seems to be an interestingly different technical design, way beyond my humble ability to understand!

Details in the 6moons review here - https://6moons.com/audioreviews/crayon/crayon.html
and the Crayoin website http://www.crayon-audio.com/en-cfa-1-2-black/

[Firebottle]

Wow, some write up.
Basically it has a switch mode power supply, bridge mode outputs and no coupling caps. Plus very effective RFI filtering and pc board layout.

[jandl100]

What's the idea behind the live input sockets?
I've been warned never to swap cables unless the amp is turned off.

[Firebottle]

It's not the input sockets that are 'live' as you say, but they do have RFI filtering on signal and ground connections.
It is the speaker terminals that are both 'live' as it is a bridge output, so don't earth either output connection.

Always a good ides to switch off before changing any connections, I have blown fuses by not doinfg so in the past (oops).

[jandl100]

Ah, OK - thanks, Alan.

[User211]

Nah the Crayon is obviously coloured (did you see what I did there?).

IMHO quite a few amps go 'all nice' when they have been on a long, long time. Annoying to say the least. But sometimes they go 'all nice' too far. And you crave for a bit of bite back.

It's hi-fi. Can't and never will win. None of us.