450 Pound Monobloc Amplifier

D-sonic and a few other manufacturers are an early adopters of new energy-efficient power conversion technologies recently developed by small Northern European companies such as Pascal, Abletech, and Hypex (Ncore). The new power conversion modules outwardly enable the implementation of physically small power amplifiers with very attractive price/performance ratios. It will be fascinating to observe if the new designs constitute a mere blip in the landscape, or if their underlying technologies are gradually adopted by a broader range of manufacturers with a variety of design/sonic philosophies and degrees of sophistication.

G.

I have a 1500W hair dryer that weighs less than 1 pound. Doesn't sound that good though.

You could probably dry your hair with the Boulder but you'd have to crank it up for a while first:)

With all the advances in smaller, lighter-weight, energy efficient designs, great sound and digital technology, stuff like this seems ridiculous, but hey, it's only hernias and money.

New 650W Rowland model 725 monoblocks are only 54lbs (including fancy heavy case milled of single billet of aluminum). The key is power supply. Rowland uses quiet switching power supply (SMPS) that provides line and load regulation while traditional supplies are not regulated at all, noisy and require huge amount of output capacitors to hold voltage steady, not to mention gigantic transformer. Transformers in Rowland SMPS are small because they operate at higher frequency. Transformer that operates at 100kHz can be 10x smaller than one operating at 60Hz. Rowland operates at 1MHz. In addition it provides power factor correction, meaning it presents itself as resistive load, while typical power supply takes current is narrow current spikes of big amplitude increasing requirements for cable gauge, wall socket quality etc not to mention radiated noise.