I had one other quite strange situation with the amp when I first used it.
I'll start at the beginning, for A N Other User Evaluation.
Came home from a couple of hours out and was excited to see a parcel on the front doorstep.
Right size, right weight; could it be??
Opened it up and was actually quite surprised by how diminutive the Amp is in the flesh!
Surely an amp that small couldn't compete with my current amps?
Glad to see it came with an Aussie power cable (the ultra didn't, and I don't have a spare audiophile power cable lying around).
Note that so far I have only used it in one room / setup - replacing my pro / smsl dac / marantz pm6006 amp, into Krix speakers.
Long weekend coming up here though!
I unplugged the speakers from the marantz and was very careful to ensure I got the left /right and pos/neg all correct on the amp pro.
Bare wire connections, so I also double checked and tightened the speaker ends too.
Did that before plugging in the mains cable too
Turned it on, same experience as adias, and as expected: firmware update etc. and a very smooth setup process.
So, time to get listening!
Fired up Tidal Connect, set the volume to a little under half way, chose my 'Demo' playlist of 10 songs and sat back to be...
...totally underwhelmed and quite disappointed.
(But keep reading!)
So much so that I seriously though I had wired the speakers up incorrectly to start with.
My notes on each song had a common theme.
Here're some of them, just for fun!
"Relaxed presentation, Quite dull even." (1st song that is quite soft for half of it.)
"Very heavy bass. Vocals don't stand out from the background."
"Bass loud, but percussion is not crisp. Flat presentation."
"Beginning (of song) is dull. Doesn't grab your attention."
"Just a wall of sound. No finesse."
While listening to a song titled 'Lost': "Sums up the amp in one word."
"Vocals are soft, lacking punch. Like the whole presentation."
"Vocals just don't have the grip, grit, roughness I'm expecting."
"Ending (of a song, where it climaxes) is just mushed together."
My final comment was "'Reminds me of listening to the (original) Pro's analog out, but with a lot more bass. Significant lack of emotion and engagement with the music. Very, very underwhelmed."
So, where to from here?
When I applied room correction to my pro in this room it made a suble, yet significant, improvement.
The speakers are not well placed and the bass is accentuated. Nothing like the bass from the Amp Pro was, but RC did tame this nicely.
I ran RC on the amp pro using the defaults, with a cheap Android phone. Samsung A5?
Well, the sound was immediately transformed!
"Much, much better. The overwhelming bass has gone and the vocals are allowed to come through."
"Guitars now shine. Plucking is much clearer."
"Vocals no longer drowned out."
"Vocals greatly improved. The rawness is now evident."
"Perhaps lacking a bit of 'oomph' now, has RC tamed it a bit too much?"
"Cymbals much more evident, stands out from background now."
"Far better stereo separation."
The RC added 4* 2.5db dips at both 41hz and 106hz. For me, that took away some of the 'thump' I've probably got used to.
Since then I have manually adjusted the RC to bring back some of the bass.
As for what caused that initial, woeful, experience?
No idea. Toggling between my RC settings and EQ off now simply sounds like I'd expect - less/more bass, more/less overall cohesion.
So, my conclusion (if a short time listening in one room / setup can be called a conclusion).
I have never had a class D amp before, and wasn't sure what to expect. That, and it's tiny
Colour me surprised, and impressed.
It's so easy to just start streaming. No longer have to turn on my dac and amp first.
Press a preset on the remote and away we go!
And, being called Amp, it's high up the list of Tidal connect devices so I no longer have to scroll down to find my pro.
Maybe I should rename the Ultra to An Ultra?
It's the little things that matter, and this thing is little.
Looking forward to swapping out the Hegel for this
