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Atma-Sphere Class D… Amazing

Today I picked up my Atma-Sphere Class D Amps. These aren’t broken in yet. And they are simply amazing. I’ve listen to a lot of High End Class D. Some that cost many times what Atma-Sphere Class D costs. I wasn’t a fan of any of them. But these amps are amazing. I really expected to hate them. So my expectations were low. The Details are of what I’ve never heard from any other amps. They are extremely neutral. To say the realism is is extremely good is a gross understatement. They are so transparent it’s scary. These amps just grab you and suck you into the music. After I live with them some and get them broken in. And do some comparisons to some other high end Amps Solid State, Tubes and Class D’s, also in other systems I’ll do a more comprehensive review. But for now, these are simply amazing amps.. Congrats to Ralph and his team. You guys nailed on these.

 

 

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Showing 2 responses by atulmajithia

atulmajithia
12 posts
 

Embrace the 2nd and 3rd harmonic distortion at low levels is the message. If you don’t like the message then move on.

Someone, please correct me:

I don't believe that the idea is to "want" 2nd and 3rd harmonic distortion, but rather our brains use the 2nd and 3rd harmonics that are produced by the musical instruments to perceive certain aspects from the sound. I don't believe any type of harmonic distortion from an amplifier is "desirable".

atulmajithia
12 posts
 

@atmasphere

Thank you for your patience and great explanations. With regard to the high-lighted statement below:

That is why we never ran feedback with our OTLs, since keeping distortion vs frequency linear across the audio band is pretty important if you want the amp to not sound harsh. That’s easy in a tube amp if you don’t run feedback! Our OTLs have as few frequency poles as you can get in a tube amp and even with them we ran into issues with their phase margin. IOW, very difficult to prevent oscillation even with a carefully designed feedback loop if running large amounts of feedback. Conventional amounts were no problem but had all the downsides that have given feedback a bad rap in high end audio.

 

Would you please expound upon your statement: "keeping distortion vs frequency linear across the audio band"? I am afraid I don't quite follow.

 

Also, since you mentioned that your Class-D amp uses a fairly large amount of loop feed-back, which helps keep THD down, would you please inform what your amp produces by way of Transient Intermodulation Distortion (TIM)? In that light, since there are many different methods of measuring TIM, and also since it's very difficult to measure, would you please inform which method(s) were used?

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