LSA Voyager GAN Amplifier

@ricevs Yes the Conductor SE speaker cable. The FrontRow is on the sidelines until next week. I did try the FrontRow for 1 album and it is at another level of goodness. However, I reluctantly took it off and put in the Conductor cable for the past few hours.

I will be burning in the Voyager on the RAAL interface box (I have 2 of these now) until Monday. After a few more hours the weekend starts and I will let the Voyager burn in non-stop. I won't be listening this weekend on this system. That should get me very close to 200 hours.

The chassis of the GAN 5 is steel.  The GaN 400 is non-magnetic.  Since the GAN 5 is probably going to be returned I'm not going to open it up so see if removing the top makes any sonic difference.

The GaN 400 is organized quite differently internally compared to the picture of the Voyager but there is a sort of screen on the top of the GaN 400 that lets you peer inside to a limited extent and the layout of the components seems identical to the Voyager.  Now I could be wrong about them having identical modules because the view is so restricted and I can't see the totality of the board.

This is good news that the chassis is steel on the GaN 5.   This means my mods will make even more difference.

One trend I’ve noticed is that every time there is a so-called ’breakthrough’ in class D technology, folks are going gaga over it initially. It is proclaimed with much fanfare that ’class D technology is finally here,’ and how much better it is than class A and tubes and everything else under the sun. After a few months, the same posters have moved on to something different. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade here, but this ’second coming of class D’ story has been repeated ad nauseam on this site and many others. I hope you can see why some of us are skeptical. There’s a reason that valves and class A, despite being heavy and inefficient, have stood the test of time.

As Mark Twain once said, ’the stories of my death are greatly exaggerated’ ... I will check back in 6 months again.

Class D has always been as good as class A......the output stage....that is. The rest of it has needed work.....hence the evolution. All these $3000 new GaN amps are still using op amps for the buffer and modulation stages. We will see a true revolution when discrete stages are used everywhere and every part and power supply is tweaked by ear....just like the $100K Boulder amp is. You are not going to see a $3K amp stock beat a $100K Boulder mono block pair.....no way. However, with some mods these amps could be as good as most anything under $10K.....yes, that would be a big breakthrough. The people that are buying these $3K and less new Class D amps are not the people who buy the Gryphon’s, Boulder’s, etc. amps. We simply cannot afford them....and I find it a silly waste of money so spend that amount on one component.

As these inexpensive new Class D amps start to push the big boys.....you will see the big boys coming to the table. Look for Gryphon and Boulder and Audionet super high end amps using class D output stages......yes, some of them will see the writing on the wall and know it is to their advantage to make smaller more efficient amps that sound just as good as their class A amps but are less than half price to sell. You only need two pairs of GaN transistors to make 400 watts in class d and basically hardly any heatsink area.

Mytek is about to release a $6K stereo GaN amp and $20,000 mono block GaN amps. Will these challenge the big boys....or are they still using op amps and not so great execution?.......we shall see....er hear....very soon. I really don’t trust Mytek.....look at the cables they sell.....look very ordinary.

I predict that within 3 years all these big class A amps will be boat anchors.  Class D is going to take over the world........can you dig it?  Will the "expensive toy group" be listening to the latest class D amp from Gryphon?.....he he.