While I agree with many of your points, consider that ALL aftermarket improvements to engines/suspensions... happened because of DIYers who had the intellect to see the shortcomings in the OEM design and the ability to improve on them, as opposed to starting from scratch. Many eventually became OEM over time
Atma-Sphere Class D… Amazing
Today I picked up my Atma-Sphere Class D Amps. These aren’t broken in yet. And they are simply amazing. I’ve listen to a lot of High End Class D. Some that cost many times what Atma-Sphere Class D costs. I wasn’t a fan of any of them. But these amps are amazing. I really expected to hate them. So my expectations were low. The Details are of what I’ve never heard from any other amps. They are extremely neutral. To say the realism is is extremely good is a gross understatement. They are so transparent it’s scary. These amps just grab you and suck you into the music. After I live with them some and get them broken in. And do some comparisons to some other high end Amps Solid State, Tubes and Class D’s, also in other systems I’ll do a more comprehensive review. But for now, these are simply amazing amps.. Congrats to Ralph and his team. You guys nailed on these.
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@ghasley +1 on all your posts. @atmasphere Ralph, I haven't heard your amps ,best wishes for success with them. You are always a gentleman on any thread and once again so in your responses on this one. Always look forward to your insights and learning from your background and knowledge. |
I’m not the one making claims about a product you’ve never seen or heard. I don’t doubt that in your experience with the gear you’ve had at hand that your experience is valid. With that said, I get mild indigestion when some hop on a thread to pontificate when they have absolutely no experience with the topic. Just because you’ve rolled op-amps on some class d amps doesn’t make you qualified to discuss and suggest modifications to an amplifier with which you have no qualifications or experience.
This thread was about Atmasphere class d amps...it was not a casting call. If you had posted to a thread entitled "Let’s discuss modifications you’ve made to pedestrian class d amplifiers that made improvements" I assure you I would have perused your comments and moved on. I dont own and never have owned any Atmasphere gear, I don’t know Ralph other than through the scores of truly helpful posts here on Audiogon.
I figured you would double down on your position...but let’s agree to disagree...you believe your opinion on Ralph’s new amplifiers and whether you could improve upon the design is relevant...I do not. |
People believe and say and do all kinds of things......does not make it true.....same for me. What I state about op amps is my experience.....if Ralph has a different EXPERIENCE then that is fine. The only way to know what is true in this case is to try a discrete op amp in place of the one he uses and listen. I am not doing that....are you? So, neither of us knows what would happen......but since my experience has been universal (that is, no matter where and how you use an op amp......it has a sonic signature)......I bet it would be the same here. This is what Ralph stated: "Our input buffer has a gain of 2, which is to say there’s a lot of feedback and with modern opamps, as long as you don’t ask more than about 20dB or so, they will be as neutral as you can get." The above statement is not my experience......again, no matter how much feedback...all op amps sound different (and none of them are neutral)....all of them: discrete and Integrated circuit ones. BTW, Nord, Apollon, VTV, etc. sell amps that have discrete input buffer option....so you can roll op amps......all op amp options sound different from each other.....this buffer is on the input of a class D Purifi module......it uses very little gain.....just like Ralph......you can also put adapter boards in these discrete op amp input boards with regular op amps on them.....yes, they sound different again....and not as good as the discrete ones.....go read their sites......email them....they will tell you about how different they sound......I am not the only one in the world with this experience.....lots and lots of people have rolled the latest op amps....... Shall we move on? Or shall we keep talking about things that we cannot prove? |
What little credibility you might have once had is now gone. You have basically just said Ralph doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to op amps in his own design. You've never heard it and yet you imply that he didn't hear what he heard after YEARS of development on the product.
I predict you will delete your posts in this thread OR you are so falsely arrogant about what you think you know that you will double down. #zerocredibility |
The tweaks I suggest are universal.....every amp in every price category would improve it's sound to the same degree (assuming they are made like the Atmas). this includes the op amps......it does not matter how much feedback or how much gain is being used.....the sonic signature remains.......this will always be so.....everything has a sound. The speaker cable plastic clampy thang is not dangerous.....you can mount the plastic hardware on something and no metal is exposed. I’ve always liked Goofy.....one of my favs. Check out the speaker ideas page on my website and you will see some plastic speaker wire clamps mounted on an external xover. Perfectly safe. What Ralph believes is what he believes......only truth is truth.....you have to listen to know what is true in audio.......What you believe is what you believe......it is best to BE LIVE.......and that means LISTEN......then you will KNOW. Shall we get back to listening impressions of the amp? Will anyone try the steel removal and let us know? Be bold.....go where no one else would go.....do it for the gipper or your mother, or God or for YOU. BE, LIVE, LISTEN, KNOW......and while you are at it....LOVE and JOY! |
True, as is the converse, which you are living proof of: if you do listening tests with total prejudice then you will hear everything. Who are you to say what I have and haven't tried, tested, and listened to? You haven't a clue. |
So what you are saying must be that you have listened to the new Class D amplifiers from Atmasphere, you have tried the modifications you suggested in these amps and you have identified each of your mods as improvements? You state that op-amps "upgrades" in the Atmasphere will improve things but Ralph clearly stated that his circuit is different so the differences in op-amps are moot, the speaker cable pigtail idea is potentially dangerous and not appropriate in a professionally built product offered to the public for sale and your glue the transformer hack seems kindof semi-permanent let alone goofy.
I’m not saying your tweaks don’t work in pedestrian gear (Topping? The amps you build?) but Ralph stated that your suggestions are not material improvements in his design. |
So, what you are saying is: Your purpose here is to make sure everyone knows that what I say cannot be trusted"? Wow, that is a very high purpose. Your soul must be celebrating. So, what wares am I peddling with my post? You can test FOR YOURSELF....what I say.....by trying it in your system....and see if you hear any difference or not. Of course, if you do listening tests with total prejudice then you will never hear anything. If you live in the bay area you can come over to my house and I will demonstrate things that will blow your mind to kingdom come. Are you open to learning? Or do you want to just say the same things over and over? Since you do not listen to the things I state....then you have no knowledge....plain and simple.....you just have a thought that what I say is wrong......but you will not test it yourself....sad.....so easily tested. The thousands of audiophiles all over the world that listen to wires, fuses, jacks, etc......are LIVING PROOF that these things are real. What proof (listening tests) do you have that what they all say is wrong? Please share. |
Of course I listen, I just don’t put much stock in the fabulous, unsupported claims posted as fact by a biased, self interested, guru constantly peddling his wares on a non-commercial venue. |
Ralph, It is the truth that anything conductive on top of the transformer or in the middle will mess up the sound.....so, you don’t want non magnetic stainless steel, brass or anything like that. You want plastic or wood.....wood being preferable. You can tie your transformer down using glue and wire ties.....works great. A steel plate on top of the transformer will mess up the sound. This is truth. Hot rodding does not always look good.....what do you care what the amp looks like from behind? You can make an even better AC filter and put it on a board....much better sonically than the ones that are encased in steel.....way better. Audiophile fuses most always make a sonic improvement.....it has nothing to do with voltage drop. They all have a sound (every brand of fuse sounds different)......just like the AC inlet has a sound. The one you are using is not as good of SOUNDING inlet as a Furutech.....and even the various versions of Furutech inlets sound different from each other. You are wrong about op amps......every opamp made TODAY sounds different from every other op amp made today. None of them have "no sound". The best discrete op amps are simply more real sounding than any "chip" op amp. I have listened to even the latest op amps and still none of them are as good as a great discrete circuit.......they are getting close.....but to get the last bit of depth, palpability and realism......no....not there yet. And any circuit is only as good as the regulators, AC power, fuses. capacitors, bypass caps, wire, resistors (yes, every brand of surface mount resistor has a SOUND). The reason I KNOW all this is because I do serious listening tests. This is the only way to KNOW something is real. This is not philosophy or something YOU THINK is real. When you hear it....you KNOW. You have to have a willingness to really KNOW and an openess to find out.....it is not about pre conceived notions. You do listening tests to blow your mind.....not to confirm your bias. The ego wants to define and defend. The soul wants to expand and love. The ears just listen and know. The heart feels and knows. Kuribo, Being right and making people wrong is just an ego game. If you have not listened with an open mind to what I am taling about then you have NO KNOWLEDGE....just words. Knowledge is direct experience....not "thinking you know". If you want to KNOW something about audio....then you have to listen.....without prejudice. Are all the thousands of people worldwide who have listened to audiophile fuses and love them and describe the sound of different brands all hypnotized by the "snake oil salesmen"?.......are we all that stupid? CAN WE TRUST OUR EARS?........I believe so. What I share with others is what I have learned from listening. When I get a benefit sonically, I want to share it with the world because most people who LISTEN and TRY what I suggest find the same truth....they hear pretty much the same thing and their sound is benefited. I want people to have better sound....that is why I share......what is your purpose here?
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@ricevs : Rocky the Squirrel to Bullwinkle the Moose - "You don't have to be a squirrel to be nuts!" |
I’ll let you in on a secret. Use Non-magnetic stainless bolts and then you don’t have to go thru all that. A regular steel bolt heats up because its a magnetic resistance to the transformer and typically runs hotter than the transformer itself! Change it out to stainless and the transformer draws less power and runs cooler- and may well put out a slightly higher voltage. But FWIW due to the high amount of feedback, the class D has a lot of power supply noise (and voltage sag) rejection. Class D amps running less feedback will benefit more on this account.
Anyone doing this is really asking for trouble! To start with any manufacturer would void the warranty in a heartbeat. It also doesn’t go down well unless you live in a mancave wearing cargo shorts and no hope of a date :) ... if you get my drift
This is a really Bad Idea. In our case there’s an AC filter on the backside of the IEC connector (the amp in the video is from the first production prototype run). If this isn’t present, there could be noise issues. In our amp, the rectifiers in the power supply are the main source of noise and we did a lot to snub them, but the noise filter was added to really make it silent. In this way it puts out less noise on the AC line than most tube amps. You could change out the fuse but I think you’ll find that due to the large amount of feedback, the minuscule voltage drop across the fuse will have no effect whatsoever.
Here’s another thing I’ll let you in on. What is important in opamps is something called Gain Bandwidth Product. If you have enough to support the feedback in the circuit, there will be no ’sound’ of the opamps other than noise (and in our case the noise floor of the amp is mostly from the opamps). Back in the 1960s and well into the 1980s opamps did have a ’sound’ which is why if you have to change out an opamp in a vintage guitar effects pedal, its important to find an exact replacement or the pedal won’t sound right (guitar players are quite picky about that sort of thing!). Our input buffer has a gain of 2, which is to say there’s a lot of feedback and with modern opamps, as long as you don’t ask more than about 20dB or so, they will be as neutral as you can get. A friend of mine designed one of the higher performance discreet opamps out there (back when it was still worth it) and he’ll be one of the first to tell you what I did above. IOW doing something like this will result in no benefit whatsoever. To design a class D amp you can’t just wing it by plopping parts in; you have to do the math and understand the engineering behind it.
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A couple years ago Ric came out with his EVS 1200, based on the same IcePower modules that PS Audio eventually came out with using the same modules in their M1200s 9but at ~ 3Xs the price). Ric made a lot of improvements to the modules, though some issues could not be addressed. I raved about it in a AG thread that had many hundreds of followers, that is until my LSA Voyager 350 GaN amp arrived (about a year later). IMHO, from the first note, there was simply no comparison. Ric mods stock Voyagers, which may be the best audio bang for the buck going |
I too am a class D convert after many years and many amps. It is really hard to say if they are better than class A A/B because of everything has changed along the way, speakers, preamps, DAC’s cables etc. I still love tubes and will probably always have a tube pre with a tube regulated power supply, a professional (recordings studio DAC / Streamer) and class D Amps because of sound, weight and heat. In summary class D with ultra fast switching (GaN) is pretty good. Good enough to pay attention too. I own AGD and don’t plan to change any time soon. They just work and sound great and should not be ignored when looking at amps. |
@ricevs I wouldn’t be surprised if @atmasphere agrees with some of your suggestions (or some variation thereof), but in retail world they’d also likely up the price by hundreds if not thousands of $$$. Gotta draw the line somewhere to reach a price point the market will bear, and from the impressions of current owners it appears Ralph made very good choices to reach his target price point. Then again, this is why mods in our world are popular and why manufacturers introduce “SE” versions that use higher-quality parts and design techniques. The one thing I’d ask Ralph is if there’s a stereo version in the future that saves a box, decreases the price, and hopefully preserves most of the magic of the mono blocks (kinda like the AGD Tempo di GaN)? Just hoping 🤞🤞🤞, and congrats on what by all accounts is a ground-breaking new amp! |
Great to see the insides...... So, one thing that would make it sound more open sounding is to remove the steel plate over the transformer and removed the steel bolt. Then you raise the transformer off the chassis and place it on a one half inch thick piece of wood.....you can lightly glue the wood to the chassis and also glue (Amazing Goop) the transformer to the wood......just so it does not move around. When shipping the unit then put the steel stuff back in place to make it more secure. By removing the steel and getting the transformer off the chassis the sound will open up mucho. You can try this simply without the glue and it will take just a few minutes to remove both covers and remove the steel hardware and stick a piece of wood underneath......WHO will be first to try this? The Cardas binding posts are good but even better is to get rid of the posts, put slightly longer wire on the output and clamp that wire directly to your speaker cables using nylon bolts, washers and nuts sitting right outside the binding post holes....If you remove the spade or whatever on your speaker wire and clamp to the wire coming out of the amp.....your jaw will drop on the floor. Of course, you would want to put a Furutech super IEC inlet on the amp and get rid of the stock inlet. Get a fuse holder from Acme and wire it off the Furutech inlet and get one of those new yeller fuses from Quantum Science...... If these were my amps I would do all these things within a couple of hours of them being here......When you know what makes better sound.....well, you have to do it! Of course, there is more.....always more.....including better feet.....adding mass, etc. etc. etc. into infinity. How about changing the op amp on the input to a discrete one? Discrete op amps are generally more real and open sounding. This will be fun, reading the responses.....he he. |
oops, looks like only 1/2 of it….. lol
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Ralph, I believe this is the video: San Francisco Audiophile Society Presents Ralph Karsten of Atma-Sphere Music Systems At 59:20 we see the inside of the amps. |
Unless the room is enormous, probably not. In the average room that would work quite well. In most rooms at 85dB and speakers like that the amp would be loafing.
There is a video on youtube. Search on my name and it comes up easily. Its questions and answers from an audiophile society in the Bay area of California. I had one of the amps open in my system and showed the interior. There's no Purifi module :)
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Honestly, I think Atma-Sphere jumping into a "Class D', GaN amp is one of the most interesting developments in HiFi in a quite a while. I've always admired the Atma-Sphere OTL designs, but ended up wanting a slightly different sound so I went with Joule Electra and had a pair of VZN-160s for years. I also spent a bunch of time listening to David Berning's "OTL" offerings about 20 years ago and actually own a Linear Tube Audio amp now (among others). A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a Technics g700m2 ($2,699) to play around with and I've honestly a bit stunned by how good it is. I haven't gotten around to "picking winners" (and probably never will) but the Technics competes with the LTA Z40i and McGary/Backert Labs combo that I have in another room (speakers are Fleetwood Deville's and Volti Rivals). They all have different strengths, but it's really hard to find fault with any of them. I tried the same experiment with a NAD M33 last year and got rid of the M33 in a couple of months. I think there is a really good reason that Ralph went with GaN when he decided to take the class D plunge--I suspect it may actually be a game changing, transformative technology in the audio world. I've played with the Technics (and love it), and also have heard the AGD "Tube" GaN amps quite a few times (which is also great). Looking forward to hearing the Atma-Sphere version at some point, so really interesting to hear the OPs thoughts on his new amps. I wonder how many manufacturers will be pumping out GaN based amps five years from now? |
The Watt Wars of the late 70’s and 80’s is still live and well. People maybe shocked if they measured what they use at listening levels. So far in my room on 86-105 db speakers loudness, control, finesse hasn’t been an issue. For these amps. Not saying at times more power could be used. They can drive hard loads well. Nelson Pass talks about the First Watt. And builds amps to stay in Class A to various Watts then switch to Class AB. Why? He knows that almost all the time those amps will hardly leave if ever Class A. But people can say they have a 400 watt amp that mostly runs under 20 watts. Unless run really hard at High SPL with Lows dipping hard. I’ve run the Atma-Sphere hard on Manepans at very high SPL with very complex music. They showed no signs of fatigue or weakness. Next weekend I am going to try them in a larger room driving bigger harder speakers. My room is 30x25. But hey if people feel the need for Watts…. Watts it is…. JMHO
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It would be nice to be able to see photos of the interior of the monoblocks, as @ricevs has requested. If only to make sure there is not a Purifi module in there. :) |
Yes.
A 'straight wire with gain' is better described by our tube amps since they don't double power as the load impedance is halved, which is in keeping with how a 'straight wire with gain' would behave :) Our goal was as low distortion as possible. What distortion we get tends to the the 2nd and 3rd. |
All Bel Canto made from 2012 on.
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snapsc, Yes to all. When the guys came over. We played several pieces that highlights each of the instrument's that you mention and more. As I mentioned before the Realism and True to the Instruments is incredible. The Amps like my MA-1’s just suck you in and transport you to the concert. I found my self at times walking into the room looking for the band. They don’t have the bloom and soundstage the MA-1’s have. But, they still do very good. Soundstage is deep and wide. Cymbals, Drum taps and kicks, Brushes, Piano, Sax, Guitars all are what they should be. And these are NOT dry and lifeless. Nor bright. But they aren’t sleeping either. Simply put for the money. I’d say best I’ve heard under $10,000. Reguardless of SS, Tube, Highbrid, Class D. The XA.8 and .5 Pass guys that came but loved them. As did the Tube Guys. I was going back and forth buying Pass XA 30.8, XA 60.8 or Atma-Sphere Class D. I am very happy with my decision.
As for Ralph’s class d amps… is the music vivid and engaging? Are the harmonics rich? Do pianos sound right? How about horns? Is there sibilance? Is the soundstage engulfing? How do cymbals sound? How about drum hit? |
My wish list: 1. People would only use the words “better than” when referring to specs 2. When referring to sound the would say “I prefer… and then why 3. Amp designers would state their objective… straight wire with gain….low distortion with 2nd harmonic dominant….low distortion with 3rd harmonic dominant …etc….. I think Ralph has said this describes his amp 4. Audio enthusiasts would admit that the best products all sound so good that on any given day, what you preferred yesterday may not be preferred today As for Ralph’s class d amps… is the music vivid and engaging? Are the harmonics rich? Do pianos sound right? How about horns? Is there sibilance? Is the soundstage engulfing? How do cymbals sound? How about drum hit? These are some of the things that will convey to me how the amp sounds and whether I should try it
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@hilde45 This has apparently been answered by others, but customer feedback suggests the break-in time is real and is about 3 days or so. The amp does not seem to have a 'warmup' time though. |
Pretty simple…. I’ve had alot of Class D’s in my system. I haventliked any of them till these.
ghdprentice3,144 posts You bought a pair of amps expecting to hate them? Strange approach to putting together a great sounding system. Could you elaborate? Your system, strategy, venue. |
I’ve put together a pretty good system. I’ve tried a ton of Class D. I’ve never found one that I liked. Or would be close enough to my MA-1’s for summer listening.
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