John
Here’s something interesting. Well, interesting because it’s super cheap. The QLS wizz-kids – them behind the QA-550 WAV player – now a have digital amplifier with in-built DAC ready to ship direct from Shen Zhen for US$320 (+ US$50 shipping). It probably won’t sound as good as your Krell, but it’s certainly a possibility for a guest bedroom or shed setup. The QA-100 is remote controllable and doles out 60W into 8 Ohms.
This is what QLS’s website has to say about the QA-100:
“Traditional amplifiers input and process analogue signals, which will generate various negative factors that may impact the sound, such as distortion, frequency attenuation and bad channel separation. The QA100 directly processes and amplifies the digitally input signals. The whole process mostly transits and processes digital signals with an anti-jamming capability higher than analog signals; it is this very reason why digital amplifier tends to generate better sound than analogue amplifiers.”
Convinced that digital amplifiers are superior to their analogue brethren? Me neither. BUT it’s built to a price and purpose – and that counts for something. Interestingly, it’s under half the RRP of the similarly specc-d Firestone Rubby.
“QA100 can automatically recognise and support 16bit and 24bit 32K-192K stereo PCM digital signal inputs. Asynchronous sampling rate conversion (ASRC) technology is adopted. Combined with high-precision temperature compensated crystal to reform digital clock, it can drastically reduce jittering of digital clock and provide signals with smaller noises, a larger amount of information and higher precision to the amplifier. In the meantime, impact of input digital signals on the acoustics is also reduced, which therefore drastically lowers requirement for the front sound source.”
Features:
- Remote control control volume and input selection
- 7-seg Digital display volume value and the number of the channel.
- Master Volume: 0 ~ 80; L/R Volume Trim: -5 ~ +5;
- Use 2PPM TCXO Crystal for ASRC (crystal JITTER is below 10PS) .
- Digital input: S/PDIF coaxial RCA、S/PDIF coaxial BNC、optical toslink-type digital、AES/EBU digital、IIS/I2S digital.
- S/PDIF Input chip: CS8416
- ASRC chip: AD1896
- Power Stage chip: TAS5162 *2
- Sampling Rate: 16bit 24bit 32K-192K stereo digital input.(Auto detect)
- Power output, 4 Ω 100W * 2CH
- Power output, 8 Ω 60W * 2CH
- Total hamornic distortion (-2.5dBFS, 8 Ω)
- Dynamic Range, a-weighted 101 dB
- Signal-to-noise ratio 102 dB
- Channel separation 92 dB
- Frequency response, audio range (20Hz – 20kHz) +/-0.5dB, 8 Ω
- Input Voltage: AC 90V ~ 240V 50/60Hz
- Speaker Impedance range: 2-8 Ω
- Dimensions approx. 11.4″ x 9.45″ x 2.4″ (with all the sockets)
- Package weight: Approximately 3kg
- Package Dimension: L440 X W300 X H110(mm)
Further Information: QLS Hi-Fi
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