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I've left well enough alone in Audio Hideout for too long- time to stir up a little trouble...
Let's see a show of hands first... how may of you have heard of Dick Baker?
OK, maybe you haven't heard of him, but you've heard of a Baker Clamp? (If you've ever designed switch mode power supplies with bipolar transistors or high slew rate audio amplifiers, you should know what that is...) (invented by Dick Baker, of course).
OK, well another little gem he came up with in the late 70's was the diamond buffer, which relied on the characteristics possible with highly matched PNP and NPN transistors to make a very high linearity, very fast output buffer; it's been applied in a variety of integrated circuits by National Semiconductor and others, but never previously in a power amplifier, until the introduction of the Ayre AX-5 125W/channel Integrated and VX-5 175W/channel power amp. For those not familiar, all Ayre products are ZERO loop feedback designs- this is a challenging way to go, and requires that each circuit stage be ultra linear on it's own. As is usual, they use motor drive shallco attenuators for the volume control, but this time, like their R series preamp, with the variable transconductance control, not a conventional attenuator style volume control.
I've been wondering for a while what kind of innovation would be coming out of Ayre, if there was some spark left, and I think we have the answer. There's lots more material and reviews out on the AX-5 - it's getting a pretty good rep. My personal interest lies more with the VX-5- I don't need an integrated at this point, not really having any analog sources, but the AX-5 is fairly impressive too.
And for a zero feedback design, the performance is pretty dang good by conventional metrics- as this curve from Stereophile shows.
So, all I'm going to post here is some more pretty pictures... go out and find a dealer to listen to one at, and report back. I dare you, in fact, I double dog dare you...
And for the VX-5 Stereo Power Amp:
350W /channel at 4 ohms....
Let's see a show of hands first... how may of you have heard of Dick Baker?
OK, maybe you haven't heard of him, but you've heard of a Baker Clamp? (If you've ever designed switch mode power supplies with bipolar transistors or high slew rate audio amplifiers, you should know what that is...) (invented by Dick Baker, of course).
OK, well another little gem he came up with in the late 70's was the diamond buffer, which relied on the characteristics possible with highly matched PNP and NPN transistors to make a very high linearity, very fast output buffer; it's been applied in a variety of integrated circuits by National Semiconductor and others, but never previously in a power amplifier, until the introduction of the Ayre AX-5 125W/channel Integrated and VX-5 175W/channel power amp. For those not familiar, all Ayre products are ZERO loop feedback designs- this is a challenging way to go, and requires that each circuit stage be ultra linear on it's own. As is usual, they use motor drive shallco attenuators for the volume control, but this time, like their R series preamp, with the variable transconductance control, not a conventional attenuator style volume control.
I've been wondering for a while what kind of innovation would be coming out of Ayre, if there was some spark left, and I think we have the answer. There's lots more material and reviews out on the AX-5 - it's getting a pretty good rep. My personal interest lies more with the VX-5- I don't need an integrated at this point, not really having any analog sources, but the AX-5 is fairly impressive too.
And for a zero feedback design, the performance is pretty dang good by conventional metrics- as this curve from Stereophile shows.
So, all I'm going to post here is some more pretty pictures... go out and find a dealer to listen to one at, and report back. I dare you, in fact, I double dog dare you...
And for the VX-5 Stereo Power Amp:
350W /channel at 4 ohms....
unk:
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