Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Power Amplifier Troubleshooting

The insides of the ADA1500 look like this:

Look at that! It's so freakin' clean. Glorious, 105C caps...none of that 85C stuff that sissy engineers use. LOL!

I’d be very surprised if there was not a IC in there doing the heavy lifting. That said there is a lot more to coming up with a great design then just putting a chip on the board and following the reference. A great deal of work goes into getting all you can out of that chip. There is a lot of trail and error and trade offs which need to made ... and that’s just the amp board. Now you have support circuits like balance inputs along with the single ended ones and their interaction. Power supplies are a big deal. Problems like ripple on your supply caused by one amp may cause havoc in another. Keeping noise down Yada,yada,yada And then ya get into cases and case layout, testing to meet and pass government regulations ... documents on design, test, QA, build steps, user manuals ....

Wait did you say only a couple of years??

Well yeah a couple of years but remember that Ian and Andrew are the Chuck Norris and Chuck Norris Jr. of audio.

It's a hybrid amp so of course the real amplification is coming from chips. I can tell you this; I have owned dozens of amps in my life, this one takes the cake. It's so good I had the wife's approval to buy another one. Can it compare to a McIntosh? I don't know since I have never heard one. But to get this amount of amplification with a Mc would be 4x the price. I cannot believe it would be that much better.

I think the name "hybrid" is given to an amp that is a combination of tube and solid state. There are chips in there for sure but is there a single class D amp chip that each channel is built around or was the amp designed from "scratch"?

They are good value and it was the right product to bring to market particularly given the multi-driver active speakers.

Yep, I misspoke. It's D vs. AB. Not a hybrid.

What I meant is that it has a true toroidal transformer vs a switched mode power supply.

Yes, I love SMPS but not for audio. Old school linear power supplies are the way to go. The ADA supply looks spartan but beefy.

Mojo,
Are using spotify for music if is do you find you have to move the volume dial up quite a bit more compare to running through a server.?

I can run Spotify Premium in six different ways:

1. Chromecast Audio through my Pioneer A9
2. Chromecast Audio through my ADA-1000
3. Chromecast Audio through my Pioneer A9 pre-outs to the ADA-1000
4. Chromecast Video through my Onk
5. Through my PS3
6. Through my Firestick HD

Of all the ways above, the only one that sucks is #2. I suppose the Chromecast Audio can't supply the current the ADA-1000 requires.

Other than #2, I have not noticed volume differences between these different methods.