If i had the money.....

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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Superior Electric posts looks "generic" as everyone copied the design and these are available in Taiwan for 1/5th the pricing of the Superiors....I used the "real" thing and this was the only thing Richard Schram, head of Parasound, made a point of with me.....No problems with the Nichicon Gold Tune or Muse electrolytics, Rel styrene/tin bypass and Zobels or Harris Hyperfast diodes in the four bridges.....It was those silly "generic" looking posts.....Oh, we could do a better amp, probably without loop feedback, with choke input supply and fet outputs, class A to full power of about 100w and few could afford it as it would run 20-25K.....

Well, I'm sure that these are very fine SS amps, and for the money - yes, for SS the stats do say something, and Bob Crump is upfront, skilled and not one for propaganda.

But even given that, Sean, I think you've gone off the reservation here with the circuit-tells-the-sound stuff as your point of departure.

I've never seen that view so prominent in your posts and wonder if your enthusiasm has gotten the best of you.

I'll second Tok2000. And, if you asked the Parasound's designers, then I'm confident, not coincidentally, that they would feel the same way about how to judge a component...