HeadRoom Class D Desktop Power Amplifier

edit: perhaps.

it was physically there, however Tyll stated that they weren't able to get it running by the meet and so were powering the Amphion's with a pass labs amp (IIRC).

As of right now it's planned to be housed in a regular desktop sized enclosure, it's meant to stack with the rest of the line. Otherwise the specs are pretty much subject to change until the production version is ready.

class d amps sure have a lot of potential!

Actually they did get it running the second day, it sounded pretty great, and it is in the same case as the desktop amp.

I don't think i have any pictures, but if you see any pictures of the audiophile desktop, they are the cases that are on the inside of the speakers stands.

Also, as a bit more information, Tyll told me they weren't sure if they would be manufacturing the amps in house, so they might just be using a board from someone else, and he made sure to emphasize MIGHT, I for one am hoping that they will design their own.

The first day of the meet we were runnung the Pass amp. The second day we ran the Class-D amp...sort of.

Class-D amps are a bit of a tricky beast. So, there is two ways of going about it: 1) Simply by a amp module and stick it in our enclosure, or 2) build one around the Class-D amp chips that are available.

The amp we were trying to get running has the same module as the commercially available CA-S3 seen here:



This is the amp we were running on the second day, it was just shoved inside our Desktop Enclosure whole! Yes, it's that small. I didn't consider it cheating, because it is the electronics we were considering putting inside our enclosure and I told people that's what was going on if they asked about the amp. But I'm not sure that's the direction we'll go.

One of the issues is that I'm not sure a 20Watt amp is really enough. It played pleanty loud, but if you were able to listen critically, you'd hear a bit of compression at strong listening levels. So we're still investigating options.

For example B&O has a yet to be released Class-D amp module that's a 50 Watt amp. Here's what one of their other modules look like:



To me, the important observation with class-D amps is that when engineered and built properly the almost instantly get you to entry-to-mid-level audiophile performance at surprising low cost; they all sound about the same---quite good---right out of the box. But because they are using some very high speed circuits, if they aren't quite optimal, they're quite problematic. Therefore, we're a little hesitant to design and build them ourselves. (No reason to burden you guys with R&D when we can just plop a module in there that sounds as good as we could do without the burden of R&D.)

Also, going with someone elses modules allows us to bring the product out relatively quickly. We're planning to have the speaker stands for sale by Christmas; we'd like to have the class-D amp available by then too, but we'll just have to see if money allows the inventory increase by then. In any case it won't be too far behind we hope.