If i had the money.....

Aroc: I've heard from more than a few folks, including straight from a Classe' dealers own mouth, that the Omega's are not that good sounding. Like anything else though, it is a matter of system synergy and personal preference.

I also had a response typed up to Tok2000 and Twl but it somehow disappeared from my computer. Must have happened when it locked up earlier today. Sean
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Sean,
I am surprised that you are spending so much time looking at specs. You know better than most, it is the sound.

I personally love Krell amps. Although the specs don't change that much as I have upgraded over the years, the sound has.

Richard

The "sound" of a unit has to do with the design of the circuit, how the circuit is laid out and the quality of the parts used. A good portion of what one hears can be described in specs IF one is provided with ALL of the pertinent specs. By "pertinent specs", i'm not talking about the typical stuff that is provided in a buyers guide either.

If the specs check out phenomenally good without having to resort to "tricks" such as high negative feedback, etc.. and one doesn't like the sound of the product, it is quite simple to alter the sonics of such a unit by changing passive parts.

What do you think that most of these "tweak guru's" do for a living ? Most of them leave the circuitry as is ( for the most part ) and simply swap higher grade components in place of what the manufacturer used. This is work that a monkey could do for the most part. It is only when one gets into altering circuit design that knowledge of circuitry comes into play.

The fact that this unit is built like a tank, has a good basic design, careful attention to parts layout and hand selected high grade parts for every inch of the circuit tells me that it should be pretty close to what you can get out of a SS circuit. Like anything else, i'm sure that it could be improved in more than a few ways. It makes life a LOT easier if you start off with something that is "solid" to begin with though.

The first thing that would have to go on these amps would be the binding posts. I'd also like it if if was a little bit faster too : ) Sean
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Sean, the first thing to go would be the binding posts? I chose the Superior Electric as they are the best sounding as well as the most rugged of all the ones available.....I have run four of the JC-1s on one twenty amp circuit and have had no problems whatsoever......Atkinson had way too much fun with the specs and think Parasound's specs of .2% distortion for clipping is a better place to be than Stereophile's 1%....Yes the amps are powerful as they drove the heck out of the Sound Lab speakers at the CES, a feat in itself.....Glad the review is finally out as have been biting my tongue now for a couple months....The amp is the best we can do in a machine made very powerful amplifier......The amp would run three times the price if made here in the USA by hand....This is probably the first high end product to be machine made overseas with no scrimping on parts quality......

Bob: Hope you had a good time at CES and everything went well.

My comments about the binding posts are based on what i've seen in pictures. They look like standard "generic" binding posts in print.

As far as my comments about the "speed" of the circuitry go, I noticed that the top octave ( 10 KHz & up ) was slightly soft and rolled. This became more apparent as impedance was dropped. According to what Atkinson measured, the amp was starting to take a nose-dive in linearity below 100 KHz. JA's testing showed a -3dB point of 95 KHz, which is pretty reasonable to say the least and much better than some amps that i've seen.

Personally, i like to see a bandwidth that is out to well beyond this point. Fast, wide-bandwidth circuitry only increases in-band linearity via improved rise time and slew rate with less in-band phase shift. Then again, one can run into problems with high frequency instability and oscillation with specific loads. Pass and Spectral gear are prime examples of "vulnerable" amps.

With that in mind, I know that John is more than capable of designing a wide-bandwidth circuit and Carl has laid out gear to well beyond the multi-MHz range. As such, my thoughts are that Parasound probably doesn't want a bunch of these amps coming back in for warranty claims. Hence this was probably a design trade-off with safety in mind.

As i've said before, nothing is perfect, but IF i had the cash.... : ) Sean
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