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RE: N core

It's described very inaccurately as digital! It's plain ol' Class AB with a Class H rail. Its main difference with conventional amps is that it uses feedforward (distortion cancellation) in addition to feedback:

"The AHB2 is a linear amplifier that surpasses the sonic purity of all class-A amplifiers. No amplifier delivers lower noise or lower distortion. The small, passively cooled chassis, cleanly delivers 480 Watts bridged mono into 6 Ohms, with additional reserves for driving difficult speaker loads. Unlike power-hungry class-A amplifiers, the AHB2 achieves a power efficiency that rivals that of a Class D (switching) power amplifier."

https://benchmarkmedia.com/products/benchmark-ahb2-power-amplifier

In practice, it doesn't sound like the Class D amps I've heard.

Anyway, to me the question is does it really suck the life out of music? Because the absence of distortion doesn't do that for me. As someone said, live acoustical music has plenty of life into it, and no distortion whatsoever.

When I first got it, I level matched it and tried ABing it with my A-21. It seemed better in almost all respects. I've never heard such pure sound. And this was compared to a low distortion, high bias AB design that's mostly operating Class A.

So I guess the question Davey and others had (and I do too) was whether you were complaining about the absence of euphonic distortion or something else.

When I listened to piano through it, the transients and envelope of the AHB2 seemed off. The A-21 was far better (in all fairness, it's been reported to outdo even Pass in that one respect). It sounded like an actual piano, something most amps I've listened to don't do.

I asked John Siau about that at AES and he attributed the difference in sound to lower harmonic distortion, to which he says piano is very susceptible.

Anyway, the AHB was then out of my system for a while while I worked on other things and when I plugged it back in I got a rude shock because it seemed to be doing exactly what you said it did -- suck the life out of the music. What was missing were the transients. As with the piano, they seemed to be rounded off. That's why I was interested in what you wrote because you had apparently observed independently the same thing that I had.

I still have to do more listening, though. The Benchmark isn't supposed to require burn in but I hadn't used it for a while so I'd want to rule that out, and I'm using a more revealing DAC and did some major repairs on my speakers. Also the amps weren't level matched. So I want to do more long-term listening to make sure that I wasn't fooling myself.


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