Ayre V5 amplifier

[JonMarsh]

In the midst of last weeks tragic events, I had a few uplifiting moments, including receiving the Ayre V5 amplifier I had on order.



This is a 150W/ch @8 ohms, 300W/ch @4 ohm rated amplifier, using no loop feedback. Unlike some amplifiers, such as the Monarchy models, which use a conventional feedback gain stage driving an open loop output stage, there is no feedback loop, period. There are also some interesting design techniques used in the power supply to minimize EMI/RFI, and some unusual tricks in the output stage to assure capacitive load stability in spite of it's wide bandwidth (200 kHz).

I'll do a more formal review and write up in the Reviews section, probably by the end of the week. Since I have known the CEO and principle designer of Ayre for over two decades, I'm not an particularly unbiased observer. But this is the first time I'm putting my own cold hard cash down for one of their products, so I guess that says something a little more personal about the perceived value.

The V5 is part of a new family of amplifiers from Ayre, the other member being the multichannel V6. The latter can be ordered with varying numbers of channels, and expanded as necessary, somewhat like the BAT VK6200.

I auditioned the V-5 in two systems in August before placing my order for this one. In both, the performance was exemplary. In my own case, I'm running it in my X1 Klones, which are biamped, on the top end, from 150/175 Hz up. I'll leave detailed comments to the posted review, but let's just say the system has never sounded better, and has never sounded this good before. Exceptional focus, naturalness, and expressive micro and macro dynamics. A soulful midrange to rival top flight tube amps, but without any glare, smearing, or softness. What's weird is that even the bass seems to sound better, and there's no obvious way the Ayre should be contributing to that -excepting of course the well known placebo affect- but then, can mid and treble clarity contribute to bass slam and depth?

Ayre does about 2/3 of their business overseas, but there are about 20 dealers showing their products in about 25 stores in the US, in 15 states. Dealer list is posted on their web site.

http://www.ayre.com

If you have a chance to hear one of these, or their D1 DVD/CD player, give them an audition, if only to recalibrate your expectations of what is possible in solid state.

Best regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[George Bellefontaine]

Looks beautiful,Jon. I look forward to your review.




My Homepage!

[Andrew Pratt]

Nice looking amp! does it come in black also what interconnects are you using on this beast?

[John Holmes]

Very nice Jon. Enjoy!




"I came here, to chew bubble gum and kickass. And I'm all out of bubble gum!!!" My DVD's

[pf]

Jon, there were talks on Ayre makes (or at least design) amps for Theta. Have you listened to any of the DreadNaught or Intrepid?

PF

[JonMarsh]

Yes, the Ayre products are available in any color as long as it's black or silver... well, at least that's a little less restrictive than most manufacturers. Everything else I have is black, expect the dark gray fronts of the Palladiums, so I was getting a little tired of basic black. Sorry, Henry. (Ford)


In the sytem it's in now, associated bit and pieces are as follows:

Input Interconnects: tried both my Diamond Audioquests (balanced) and my DIY custom made with Silver Sonic cable and Neutrik connectors- the DIY are in the system.

Speaker Cables: again, custom DIY, using Silver Sonic cable. Slightly different presentation than my Cardas cables; but I'm finishing my crossover tweaks this weekend, so that may change in preference.

Preamp: Passive Marchand PR41 with some mods.

Electronic crosover: Custom DIY, 3rd order, at 150 Hz, balanced, using composite amplifiers combining OPA627 and AD815 video line drivers, with Jensen transformers (if you think transformers are low bandwidth, these babies are -3 dB at 0.2 Hz and 10 MHz.- excellent isolation and EMI suppression)

One thing I'm curious about, with the new small speakers I'm working on, is how they'll sound with the V5 compared with some other amps I have, and to what degree I should or shouldn't use that data point in voicing them. At this point, the amps I'm planning on testing them with are a Sony TAN9000ES, Denon POA 4400 monoblocks (which one friend will be using with one of the pairs of M8's), an Aragon 8002, one of my pro amp prototypes which uses English MOSFETs, and the Ayre V-5. Sounds like a busy afternoon some weekend soon.

I used to work with an older guy back in the 70's, by the name of Bill Kennedy, who had designed a few different speaker lines. He always had the opinion that the faults which speakers and most amplifiers had were very different, and that even a modest but well designed speaker could reveal significant differences between amplifiers (sort of the "anti Julian Hirsch", if you know what I mean). Though there are still, amazingly, a lot of people who hold that all reasonably designed amps sound pretty much the same (just go read an issue of "Sensible Sound"), my experience for years has been quite the opposite. Even down in the area of stuff that isn't super special, ThomasW and I have been amazed sometimes at what we hear. For example, a few years back, a friend was considering buying a Proton rackmount amp, rated about 125 watts per channel; pretty nice looking, big meters, etc. She was able to borrow it from the dealer for audition, and brought it over to Tom's. We pulled out one of the old SP-300's pro amps that I designed in the late seventies out of his family room system, plopped in the Proton, and fired it up. Less than 15 minutes later (well, actually, maybe less than five or ten minutes later) the Proton came back out, and went promptly back to the dealer, with a polite, "No, thank you". Can you spell "grit and grain"?

You can only spend so much time reading specs- its how it sounds that counts.


I've only had a brief listen to a Theta Dreadnaught, with speakers and a CD player I wasn't familiar with, but I would put them on a relatively short list of interesting amplifiers at somewhat plausible prices... that's of course a personal determination! To the best of my knowledge there is no design connection between Theta and Ayre; there was an intersting piece a while back on Neal Sinclair of Theta in Stereophile. I think he's a little like Dan D'Agostino; likes to see his picture in print, and what the heck, Neil's more photogenic than Dan or Charlie!

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[pf]

Thanks Jon for the detail reply. The reason I asked was as I said of the rumor plus Theta's 'no feedback' design claim on the DreadNaught. Of course other subtle similarities from appearance to power ratings also add to my suspicion. Please post your review on the V5 as you can.

While I am at it, can you please tell me about your DIY Silver Sonic cables & what is it that you like about it?

PF

[Lex]

Nice amp and presentation Jon. However, I can't see that you have a cable one worth it's salt, haha. JK.

Lex

[JonMarsh]

Gee, Lex, everyone's gotta leave some room for improvement in their system, don't they!?!

Who knows what Silver Cats or one of your other products might sound like in this system? Probably be interesting....

BTW, I handbuilt braided triax shielded phono cables with Triax BNC's for my turntable, using silver plated wire... in the seventies. The braid technique does work well with multiple conductors for reducing inducatance and pickup. I do like sheilds, though, which I guess Kimber and your products forego.

The DIY cables which I use aren't for the most part very DIY, just combining various raw cables and connectors. Cable I use includes AudioQuest, Cardas, and SilverSonic. I've even mixed brands- Cardas connectors with AudioQuest and SilverSonic wire, WBT connectors with Cardas cable, and, just to be contrary, Silver Sonic wire with Silver Sonic connectors.

The basic BL-1 Silver Sonic cable is very reasonable raw cable, and coupled with their RCA makes a good "budget" cable, with a floating (at one end) shield and two conductors. The physical construction provides reasonably good cable damping. I'm a little bit of a stickler for cable damping and low microphonics- probably comes from too much time in front of a Marshall stack with funky micropphonic guitar cables. ThomasW and I have compared them against a variety of other cables; they don't do well in really long runs, but for one to three meter interconnects they're almost a bargain. Transparent, good top to bottom definition, not tipped up or rolled off in the top end (unless you try long runs). You can make a good balanced connector with it, also.

A DIY interconnect I have really enjoyed, but was a pain to build, is using Cardas 5C quad link wire, with WBT phono connectors. Very neutral for moderate runs, 1 - 2 meters, though I'm told it doesn't have the sound stage of the Cardas Cross interconnect. (can't afford those!)

Another "budget" cable I've built with good results is using an AudioQuest cable with some of the "smaller" Cardas Rhodium RCA connectors; it's what's on the output of my SACD player to the passive preamp, only 1 meter. I can't remember the AudioQuest cable, it was something I got from Parts Connection.

Something to look for in good RCA's is a solid, one piece design for the ground side as well as the signal side; the Cardas, WBT, and Silver Sonic all have this. Another point is to avoid nickel plating under the gold; that's a problem with many connectors. The better connectors use a silver layer over the copper then a hard gold plate.

The Silver Sonic T-14 speaker cable is something I use for "small" systems, and internal wiring on all speaker systems I build, including the SLAMM Klones. It's well made, clean sounding, and easy to work with, but just 14AWG, so stay away from long runs.

The Silver Sonic Q-10 is a good cable for speaker runs in larger systems, and is budget priced compared to the good stuff from George Cardas. For speaker level stuff, I really prefer Cardas binding posts, particularly their new Euro style one, such as used on the V-5. For serious speaker projects, I usually use the long version of the standard Rhodium/silver plated copper posts. Wire connectors are spades, because of the gas tight pressure connection you can get.

It all comes down to the performance of the whole system, and whether the cable makes sense, compared to the other investments. For example, I could have bought a set of very high end Cardas speaker interconnects, or I could buy the V-5. I'm pretty convinced the latter was the right path for upgrading the system. Whether it would now make sense to go for the Cardas speaker cables, or some of the other high end products, (like Kimber Monocle) I don't know- I could probably only determine that (to my satisfaction) by listening to them in my system. I've listened to the Cardas in other systems, but you can't separate other parts of the system. For example, they help my friend Charlie Hansen's Avalon Eclipse's sound their best, but the Elcipes, an 8" two way, will never have the ease and dynamics my X1 Klones have, with my "cheap" DIY cables. Would the X1's sound better/ more neutral with the Cardas? Probably.... do I want to spend that kind of money to find out? Not yet....

Balancing and finding the most synergistic combination does take time and experimentation, and what works for me may not work as ideally in someone else's system. YMMV, as they say.


Tonight is "Pop" night- as usual when a significant new component has gone into the system, I meander in a variety of paths through the music collection, establishing a new baseline of expectations and experiences- in this case, quite pleasurable ones, so far, with a diverse collection of disks, from Howard Jones, Michael Penn, and Level 42, to Joan Osborne, Tori Amos, and Helium. If the classics *and* pop sound good, then we're on to something, folks!

Best regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[pf]

Thanks Jon for the very informative reply, as usual.

PF

[JonMarsh]

Po-Ming,

Your comments about the similarities between Theta and Ayre are very observant. Theta's fundamental voltage gain topology, a full complementary differential amplifier in JFETs drives a "common gate" complmentary MOSFET stage (actually, that should probably be referred to as a folded cascode, but a rose by any other name, etc.) This is the same fundamental architecture used by Ayre in both the V-3 and the V-1. In the V-3 output stage, only a complementary MOSFET source follower is used, which reqiures the input stage and the folded cascode driver to handle all the current required by the output MOSFETs - not an easy thing. This is part of what limited the output bandwidth of the V-3. In the V-1, more devices are paralleled in the input/driver stage, and Magnetec complementary lateral Power MOSFETs are used in the output stage (similar, but more linear and robust than Hitachi FETs), instead of the IR HexFETs used in the V-3.

The V-5 and V-6 series, like the Dreadnaught and Intrepid, use extended beta high Ft bipolars (3281A/1302A) in a true differential balanced bridge, but Theta uses MOSFET drivers, and the Ayre designs uses an EF triple, with base neutralization techniques to eliminate the series input resistors normally required for capacitive load stability. The thinking behind these two is very, very similar. I've used CLASS A MOSFET drivers with both MOSFET and bipolar output stages, and currently I'm evaluating a similar design, trying to decide which to use- the bipolar drivers are less expensive, and require less bias current for the same linearity. Both amps have a low current non-operating standby mode, which still maintains voltage bias on the circuits- which is good for keeping capacitors fully formed, and eliminates the turn-on stresses in the power supply for conventional amps.

Considering how similar most conventional amps are, it's nice to see some unconventional thinking converging on the same solutions. It's actually rather logical, all in all.

Best regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....