Spirit,
The short answer is, Nope.
There's a longer answer, if you're interested:
I haven't heard the Ypsilon SET100s nor the Koda electronics. As for the Ypsilon, massed paralleled single-ended MOSFETs aren't the top item I'm looking for in solving amplification problems, but it's one way to try.
I often enough get a chance to hear alternatives to gear I settled on, including steeply upmarket hardware. I don't burn many mental cycles on envy nor on worry that there's something better if only I spent a *lot* more cash. There are two reasons for this. The first is that audio isn't my only interest in life. I'm never going to spend all my disposable income on hifi. The second is that the majority of hyper-cost gear I have heard (let's define hypercost as anything that's more than 4X the price of what I own) sounds worse than my choices or not better holistically. And the few items that clearly outperform aren't sufficiently numerous to make me intrinsically optimistic about everything expensive I read a rave review about.
Because here's the problem: the industry and most of the buying public has not grasped how much of a breakthrough a Zu speaker is. I read reviews of hypercost amplifiers only to see that the speaker through which it was listened to is a multi-driver, crossover-intensive speaker that obscures amplifier differences, imposes its dynamic choke points and phase non-linearities on said amp and generally offers only a more distant facsimile of human-produced music than a Zu speaker for 1/10th to 1/3 the cost. I read a user commentary on the Ypsilon SET100 wherein Ypsilon electronics replaced Shindo and the rave result was communicated as Ypsilon yielding a much brighter sound, which the writer explained by likening the Shindo to an incandescent bulb and the Ypsilon to white LED. Well, compared to natural light, they are then both wrong. But *if* that's true, which one do you think you could live with for three years on the widest variety of recordings? Sometimes I just wonder if hifi people have any idea what they are talking about outside of impressions formed in the last 20 minutes. OK, that sounds harsh but I think you understand why I say it.
After several years of willfully ignoring the matter, I am in a Spring of phono preamp trials. I was asked by a manufacturer to evaluate a phono preamp with a retail price in five figures. A search of the planet's digital repository disgorges a river of praise for it, but again in most review cases the ancillary gear leads me to usually wonder how they could discern the reviewed preamp's true traits. Suffice for the moment to say that I found the unit disappointing to the degree that despite its many good, even great, qualities, I had a hard time figuring out what I'd want to pay for it at any price, on sound alone, given what else is out there. People who don't have Zu speakers -- or anything close to them as widebanders without crossovers -- have a hard time understanding how much conventional speaker designs homogenize the gear feeding them, relatively.
Most really expensive digital gear sounds little like music, tonally and texturally. Clean and resolved isn't the same thing as getting the sound of instruments and humans right. Most highly engineered crossover-intensive speakers disconnect you from the suggestion of reality but do a good job of selling a "hifi" sound that other people put a lot of effort into convincing you you should like. There are turntables I'd like to buy that I don't own but there are many more that have no existential argument other than the ego of designers. There are tonearms I'd like to buy that I don't own, but why is $10K, $20K, $30K needed when Thomas Schick does it better and simpler in most cases for $1800?
We are in a niche hobby industry where pricing has become divorced from benefit. And the more niche it is, the more we are subjected to the rules of a niche economy: increasingly designers figure it is more efficient and less work for them to make and sell 30 things at $100,000 each than 3000 things at $1,000 each. Look at all that cabinet engineering in a Magico speaker. It's cool, and you can write a nice mechanical engineering story on it, but it still sounds like a crossover-intensive speaker with choke points, false spatial cues and some residual zip. Almost nobody has heard Zu Dominance in a quality setting (i.e. not at the only show they were exhibited at). Only one pair exists and they are well-installed in a discerning customer's house. While the Definition 4 benefitted massively from development of Dominance, the bigger brother quashes any pretense that li'l brother can play in the same league. If you ever hear the $60K/pr. Dominance you can only cheer Zu on to cross the $100K mark. You have to hand it to Sean Casey: it would be a lot less work for him to find 30 customers willing to buy $100K speakers. He could do it. But he doesn't want to. He is on a mission to build a full line of uniquely breakthrough speakers, priced to be accessible to everyone. To do that, he's made really smart choices in his allocations for where to focus engineering intensity.
I've heard so many hypercost amps that are not able to be as musically-convincing as $19,000 Audion Golden Dreams, that the burden of proof is on anyone placing their amps at the six figures threshold. And let's face it -- to real world individuals those Audion amps are nutty expensive already. But understand that if the world had only 86 (even 90) db/w/m speakers choked by crossovers and blurred by the disunities of many drivers, I might not know the real standing of the Audions. I imagine owners of the merely four-figures Coincident Frankenstein amps understand my point as well as anyone.
"So real you can touch it reality" is perpetually out of reach. We get closer only to find that the experience reminds us how far away we actually still are. But I don't have confidence that most of high end audio is keeping its grasp on what's real. They're aiming for something else that enough people find tantalizing or satisfying. Real is something else. If Ypsilon and Koda are getting us closer, I'll be saying so if listening proves it.
Phil
The short answer is, Nope.
There's a longer answer, if you're interested:
I haven't heard the Ypsilon SET100s nor the Koda electronics. As for the Ypsilon, massed paralleled single-ended MOSFETs aren't the top item I'm looking for in solving amplification problems, but it's one way to try.
I often enough get a chance to hear alternatives to gear I settled on, including steeply upmarket hardware. I don't burn many mental cycles on envy nor on worry that there's something better if only I spent a *lot* more cash. There are two reasons for this. The first is that audio isn't my only interest in life. I'm never going to spend all my disposable income on hifi. The second is that the majority of hyper-cost gear I have heard (let's define hypercost as anything that's more than 4X the price of what I own) sounds worse than my choices or not better holistically. And the few items that clearly outperform aren't sufficiently numerous to make me intrinsically optimistic about everything expensive I read a rave review about.
Because here's the problem: the industry and most of the buying public has not grasped how much of a breakthrough a Zu speaker is. I read reviews of hypercost amplifiers only to see that the speaker through which it was listened to is a multi-driver, crossover-intensive speaker that obscures amplifier differences, imposes its dynamic choke points and phase non-linearities on said amp and generally offers only a more distant facsimile of human-produced music than a Zu speaker for 1/10th to 1/3 the cost. I read a user commentary on the Ypsilon SET100 wherein Ypsilon electronics replaced Shindo and the rave result was communicated as Ypsilon yielding a much brighter sound, which the writer explained by likening the Shindo to an incandescent bulb and the Ypsilon to white LED. Well, compared to natural light, they are then both wrong. But *if* that's true, which one do you think you could live with for three years on the widest variety of recordings? Sometimes I just wonder if hifi people have any idea what they are talking about outside of impressions formed in the last 20 minutes. OK, that sounds harsh but I think you understand why I say it.
After several years of willfully ignoring the matter, I am in a Spring of phono preamp trials. I was asked by a manufacturer to evaluate a phono preamp with a retail price in five figures. A search of the planet's digital repository disgorges a river of praise for it, but again in most review cases the ancillary gear leads me to usually wonder how they could discern the reviewed preamp's true traits. Suffice for the moment to say that I found the unit disappointing to the degree that despite its many good, even great, qualities, I had a hard time figuring out what I'd want to pay for it at any price, on sound alone, given what else is out there. People who don't have Zu speakers -- or anything close to them as widebanders without crossovers -- have a hard time understanding how much conventional speaker designs homogenize the gear feeding them, relatively.
Most really expensive digital gear sounds little like music, tonally and texturally. Clean and resolved isn't the same thing as getting the sound of instruments and humans right. Most highly engineered crossover-intensive speakers disconnect you from the suggestion of reality but do a good job of selling a "hifi" sound that other people put a lot of effort into convincing you you should like. There are turntables I'd like to buy that I don't own but there are many more that have no existential argument other than the ego of designers. There are tonearms I'd like to buy that I don't own, but why is $10K, $20K, $30K needed when Thomas Schick does it better and simpler in most cases for $1800?
We are in a niche hobby industry where pricing has become divorced from benefit. And the more niche it is, the more we are subjected to the rules of a niche economy: increasingly designers figure it is more efficient and less work for them to make and sell 30 things at $100,000 each than 3000 things at $1,000 each. Look at all that cabinet engineering in a Magico speaker. It's cool, and you can write a nice mechanical engineering story on it, but it still sounds like a crossover-intensive speaker with choke points, false spatial cues and some residual zip. Almost nobody has heard Zu Dominance in a quality setting (i.e. not at the only show they were exhibited at). Only one pair exists and they are well-installed in a discerning customer's house. While the Definition 4 benefitted massively from development of Dominance, the bigger brother quashes any pretense that li'l brother can play in the same league. If you ever hear the $60K/pr. Dominance you can only cheer Zu on to cross the $100K mark. You have to hand it to Sean Casey: it would be a lot less work for him to find 30 customers willing to buy $100K speakers. He could do it. But he doesn't want to. He is on a mission to build a full line of uniquely breakthrough speakers, priced to be accessible to everyone. To do that, he's made really smart choices in his allocations for where to focus engineering intensity.
I've heard so many hypercost amps that are not able to be as musically-convincing as $19,000 Audion Golden Dreams, that the burden of proof is on anyone placing their amps at the six figures threshold. And let's face it -- to real world individuals those Audion amps are nutty expensive already. But understand that if the world had only 86 (even 90) db/w/m speakers choked by crossovers and blurred by the disunities of many drivers, I might not know the real standing of the Audions. I imagine owners of the merely four-figures Coincident Frankenstein amps understand my point as well as anyone.
"So real you can touch it reality" is perpetually out of reach. We get closer only to find that the experience reminds us how far away we actually still are. But I don't have confidence that most of high end audio is keeping its grasp on what's real. They're aiming for something else that enough people find tantalizing or satisfying. Real is something else. If Ypsilon and Koda are getting us closer, I'll be saying so if listening proves it.
Phil