Diving in deep

By Anonymous -

Vitus Audio RS-100 Stereo Power Amplifier



Depth. That’s what you get with a good A/B amp that you just can’t quite touch with even the most excellent Class D.

Sorry, it’s the truth. Most Class A/B amps on most loads at most volumes stay in Class A anyway, and there’s no contest.

Sure, you can optimize the path of the power to your Class D monoblocks, use isolation bases to minimize vibration, place Shakti Stones or other EMI/RFI filters over the PCBs, put on your voodoo suit and hail the demon gods of audio to deliver Nirvana.

Or you can plug in a high quality A/B amp and never look back.

That pesky switching frequency and the usual harmonics of Class D just end up getting in the way of the sheer magic that is possible with the world’s best A/Bs.

Even if you eliminate the upper harmonics and create a harmonic structure similar to tube amps, as PS Audio does with the Stellar S300 amplifier I use for testing, you can’t quite match the subtle details an A/B brings that make up perceived depth in a soundstage representation.

Amp designers will say most tube amps offer more positive and negative second order harmonic distortion — low order as opposed to the high order of Class Ds. Sense of depth is connected to a touch of second order, but that’s not the whole story.

Signal purity, phase correctness, wide bandwidth at full power — these are other hallmarks of an amp that will expand the sound to the back walls and beyond.

I place this amp from Vitus into the same rare waters as the best Constellation Audio amps, the Aesthetix Atlas, the BHK from PS Audio, and the Ayre V-5xe.

Congrats to the lucky duck who snaps this one up!

Comments

  1. John/STRATCOMAugust 17, 2018 at 5:05 PM

    Funny, when I hear Vitus my first thought is bicycles so you can guess where I'm at. However, have to say that the great leap forward I made a few months ago (talking about amp classes) was replacing my fine sounding Parasound amp with a huge Threshold amp that operates A-A/B, the sound improvement was amazing! It also warms up the room nicely in the winter!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousAugust 20, 2018 at 9:19 AM

    Vitus bike frames, that's right! Way back when, I made a fixed gear out of a beautiful handmade Vitus bike... reused the original Campy cranks and brakes and re-dished the rear hub... that one was a looker!

    It's amazing how few watts we actually use in normal listening. Most of these big A/B amps aren't even breaking a sweat.

    ReplyDelete

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