Hypex Ncore NC400

It is less than a week that I have playing with a borrowed pair of NC400s, but they have amazed me. They work well with a good tubed preamp. If you have the system for it, they really expose the space around the recording extremely well. This is not a subtle thing. It can really make reality pop! My speakers are only 84dB efficient and are the bare minimum that I would want to use with these amps. Brass doesn’t have quite as much a bite with these as my current amp, but I consider that minor. The NC1200 is said to be better with brass, so it may be just a power thing. If that is the case and your speakers are more efficient than mine then you might not have that issue. Even with that issue, the many virtues of these amps greatly overcome that subtle issue. I currently plan to buy a set to replace my current amp.

Next week I plan to bypass my tubed preamp and go straight into the NC400s from my solid state DAC. If I learn any more, I will post to this tread.

Bob

My post above was badly written. I must have been half asleep. The current bottom of the line Channel Islands amp (from what I understand) is BASED on a UCD200(?). When researching the amp, I saw the name Hypex pop up so I checked it out, which led me to the NC400.

I may have been trading apples for oranges as the CI unit is based on a Ucd module as opposed to the NC400, but I found the NC400 interesting anyway.

As I said, maybe apples to oranges, but I was wondering if it is just more cost effective to get the CI amps rather than build my own based on the NC400 module. As I said, the modules and power supplies, due to the exchange rate and VAT, aren't inexpensive.

I'm figuring after everything is said and done, it's looking like an NC400 build, done nicely, is going to run about $1K each.

The NC series is better than the UCD series. I consider $2000 for a pair of NC400 based monoblocks to be tremendous value.

You might be happy enough with UCD based amplifiers, but that's impossible for me to say. That's strictly up to you and what your priorities are. What I can say is I believe the extra money you lay out will not be wasted.

Wilsynet, when you say that the NC series is "better," I take it that you are saying that the NC sounds better. It just seemed to me that the NC products were something put together to accommodate the DIY crowd and not necessarily an advancement in the technology.

In any case, I'm sure that you are right about the value, in light of what many companies are charging for a pair of mono blocks. Still, the Channel Islands units seem to be a good value as well.

I think I'm going to have to join some sort of DIY forum as see what I can find out. I seem to have caught a bug and have it in my head that building a set of amps would be a fun and rewarding thing to do.

What I'm having a hard time with right now deciding between the Icepower and the Hypex modules. It seems that the Icepower stuff is dirt cheap now, relatively speaking, with two channel modules going for $500.

The NC series is the best Hypex has to offer currently. The NC1200 modules are getting put into some very expensive amplifiers.

The NC400, in particular, is Bruno's effort to give something to the audiophile DIY community. I would not mistake the NC400 as an inferior offering to the UCD modules.