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In Reply to: RE: Yes, seems to be so posted by AbeCollins on July 25, 2014 at 16:12:57
Much quicker in my experience. My Nat is like 140 lbs and it takes a long time to get full warmed up. The heat sinks get hot pretty fast but the rest just slowly builds up and then BLAM amazing sound.
My KR was singing optimally in about 20 minutes. My other current amp, the JJ 322 (parallel 300B SET) takes about 30 minutes and at first it doesn't sound very special at all. Then it opens up and clears up and the sound is pretty darn nice.
Follow Ups:
I was reading about your NAT as well as the KR 350i. I read from the NAT website as well as your review posted on the Asylum last yer.
"To avoid unnecessary heat from pure class A operation, Symbiosis Se use automatic adaptive bias - mean if the listening level is not so high then dissipation drop due to lower consumption of power."
In any case, do you know approximate MSRP in USD for these amps?
I don't know the US prices but the KR is 10,000 Euro and the NAT 11,500 Euro.
I know the NAT claims to be sliding bias but I don't see/feel any difference in the heat sinks...they just get damn hot after about 30 minutes regardless of what level of music is playing (or just idling).
It must run Class A all the time though because it is single ended. The four big heat sinks all have ONE transistor slapped on the bottom. The back two amplify the signal and the front two regulate the back two.
14k for the VA350i, which doesnt even have an active preamplifier component.
I believe prices rose 30% last year. There also are lots of questionable issues with this company over the years- see the 'gon thread.
Well, I owned 3 of them and they never had any serious issues and now two of my friends have ones and they love them.
I believe they are currently 10K euro here in Europe.
Nice amps but the pricing is almost 10x more than I want to drop on my 'office system'. ;-)
I'm not even remotely suggesting that the Sony is in the same league as the NAT but the similarity in design philosophy doesn't seem that far apart. The Sony also uses a form of 'sliding bias'. It's heat sinks appear to be the same temperature running idle as they do when playing music. And Sony also attempts to minimize the number of output transistors in it's push-pull output stage.
The power amp, meanwhile, uses a simple push-pull design, with a single pair of transistors driving the speaker: as Kingdon’s white paper explains it, ‘In many cases large output amps employ a power amp stage with multiple transistors to achieve high current output volume, but transistors do not perform identically and emitter resistance is used to stabilise transistor variations.
‘In this amp however, the power amp stage features only one pair of transistors and a design that eliminates variations in each channel at the source, enabling elimination of variation-controlling emitter resistance as well.’
The amplifier is also designed to change its bias according to the volume setting, with the result that most users – unless they’re total volume-level maniacs and/or have extremely hard-to-drive speakers – will find the Sony is actually working in Class A for most of their listening.
The idea is that this technique keeps the output devices working in their most linear range, but without excessive heat.
Abe,
Is there a thread where you describe the setup or software used to interface your Mac mini and your Ipad?
I am thinking about replacing my Windows laptop with a Mac mini using my ipad Air as controller/keyboard/monitor but was not sure how well this would work? Thanks.
I wasn't really suggesting one of them for your bedroom system. I might suggest something like the Pathos TT or Classic one though. Both are pretty darn nice sounding hybrid integrateds.
"'m not even remotely suggesting that the Sony is in the same league as the NAT but the similarity in design philosophy doesn't seem that far apart."
That is stretching it quite a lot don't you think? One is a single ended hybrid with no compromise (or almost no compromise) design and the other is pure SS, push pull and clearly built to a price point. One weighs 40 lbs the other 140...
The only two other amps I know of with something like the same design is the old Blue Circle Audio BC-2 and the curent Ypsilon monster monoblocks.
No one else besides these three companies I know of has ever made a single ended hybrid design.
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