Nuforce

Mmakshak, I tried running my Nuforce Ref. 9s single-ended (directly from my APL Denon), but I got quite a bit of noice (hum). A friend of mine also tried running his Opus CD Player direct using single-ended interconnects to my pair of Nuforce and experienced the same noise problem. So I've been running balanced cables from my APL to the Nuforce, and the noise is much lower (almost inaudible). By the way, the Nuforce (and the APL) are very revealing, so any change in cabling you will hear. Wait until your APL Denon has about 200 or more hours of burn-in. It is really a magical player. Have you tried running the APL direct to the Nuforce? Does yours have the AKM DACs? I am very happy with this combo. Now I just some room treatments to dial things in.

I just picked up a pair of these.......totally awesome. Far better than my Oddysey monoblocs........they crush them in terms of transparency, detail, imaging etc..

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it appears to me that comparisons that have been made are between the NuForce and conventional mid-fi/lower high-end amps. In that case it is not very interesting as conventional amps tend to get better when they are higher priced (not because they are overpriced but because they have larger power supplies, tighter tolerance components etc.). It would be interesting to compare the NuForce and let's say a $8-10,000 US conventional amp. I know this would be unfair, but it remains an interesting comparison. If the NuForce isn't wiped out by the much pricier amp, then it would be very convincing indeed. My own personal experience with an Acoustic Reality (eAR) ICEpower amp (also class D) is that in comparison with the almost 10 times more expensive Accuphase A-50V the eAR is no slouch. That's why I'm not longer convinced of the necessity spending $10-20,000 US (or more) for a conventional poweramp to get good sound.

Chris

Just a few observations to throw into this. I had a pair of Rowland Model 201s, and bought a very early pair of Nuforce Ref 8, the 70W version. The Nuforce was almost impossible to listen to, being hard from the upper midband up. I then opened them up to discover Nuforce obviously had no idea of how to implement an audio design. Not surprising. It is a rare firm that can do the fundamental design and the commercial design too. So I started modding the heck out of it. In some cases all that was required was an improvement in a cap or a resistor quality level (such as they had a poyester cap as the input CD blocking cap - how could they?!!!). Everything else really came down to the fact the design was ultra-wideband, presumably because the theory says this will give you perfect phase response. But in the real world ultra-wideband meant noise in the system, and users would experience different noise issues depending on their situation and particularly in terms of cabling. It took a lot of experimenting to figure out the best ways to reduce the RFI without screwing with the sound but the biggest bang for the buck was putting a choke on the speaker output. Essentially I had to figure out how to eliminate noise getting in through the power cord, the interconnect and the speaker wires. After a lot of hours of 'fun', and very few dollars of playing around, these babies sound utterly glorious with a natural sweetness and delicacy, tied with a vice-like grip to the swing and flow of the music. The 70W version has no problems driving my Verity speakers. The Rowlands have been sold. I am hoping to get a pair of Ref9.02s to do a quick comparison soon. I suspect Nuforce has been doing mainly what I have been doing - implementing the original, and obviously excellent, design properly.