coltrane1 I have a Plinius SA100 MkIII that checks all the boxes for me. Balanced or single ended inptuts, selectable Class A or AB operation, beefy heat sinks and top notch electronics. Hasn’t had an issue in the past 20 years of operation! Keeps me warm during the long Maine winters too! 🥶
Class A amplifiers
I was watching YouTube reviews on Hifi and one guy said if you like Class A amps you have to accept that every 3 or 4 years you have to send them in to get serviced Becasue the heat inevitably causes issues? Is this true? I have a friend with an older Maek Levinson Class A amp and he was looking to sell,it to me, and am just wondering if Class A amps are like a boat, always costing you more . Anyone?
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emrofsemanon: I’ve recently come a long way on my push-pull, class A, SS, tube, hybrid, SET, SIT amplifier journey. IMHO, my SET implementation (dual Coincident 845 Turbo’s -28 watt and 94db efficient speakers) brought me closer to acoustic music than any other implementation (of approximately 25 different amp combinations- Bedini, BEL, Threshold, Muse, ARC, Moscode, Counterpoint, etc.). Terms like organic and realistic applied. The realism of an acoustic guitar was breathtaking. However, the tradeoff was weaker dynamics- somewhat thin sounding on large dynamic swings of rock and orchestral music. In the end, I settled on an Firstwatt SIT-3. Nearly as good as the Coincident SET in realism, but with a far superior coherent presentation of the entire audio spectrum. I can say I’m temporarily satisfied. |
While they are "high bias" Class-A Plinius 102 amps cannot be biased "Pure Class-A to their rated 8ohm wattage output". They run A/B. To have those heatsinks at a constant safe 55-to 60c they would have to be approximately 4 x that size for the amp to be safe to be pure class-A all the way. Search all you like and won’t find it stated anywhere they are Biased up Pure Class-A all the way into 8ohms, not even on their archived website. https://web.archive.org/web/20060115165723/http://www.pliniusaudio.com/pro/pro02.htm At a guess I would say 50watts of Class-A and the rest is B up to 125w Cheers George |
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