You can get amps that run a bit warm and have lots of class a goodness, or you can get some cool running polished turd of a design.
You pays yer money…
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This is true - there’s deffo a heat/SQ trade-off…depends what you want…
Is Jim not selling this at the minute?
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Had a pair once. Horrible things and not a patch on their tripath amps.
Return to this starter system. 
Two tuners and two timers, wtf?
And a rising top end. Yuck.
phwoooooar in a sid james stylee. That gives me the right 'orn that does.
Sadly the Xmas bonus was not as expected this year so my hi-fi plans have been put on hold for now.
Well things changed stars aligned prices dropped and permissions granted. New power amp on its way to me early next week.
Went for the desire decade in the end. At £650 it was a bit of a steal I think given they go for a few hundred more usually.
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Good price.
Yeah I thought so too.
I’ve also sorted out the speaker cable situation with some nice thick ofc stuff from amazon and some new banana plugs. Unfortunately fuckwitted me snipped one side about a foot too short so it no longer lies nicely on the floor but ‘drapes’ artistically over a radiator.
In a fit of uncharacteristic enthusiasm I also opened up the ottoman of hi-fi past (an undertaking as it is buried underneath a load of work crap) and fished out various bits of hi-fi wire that have been languishing in there since the last decade sometime. In there were a pair of RCA cables made by my own fair hand sporting a natty set of ‘bullet plugs’ that were all the rage 10 years ago and I also found some truly elephantine tackle power cables. ‘Analogue Research Silver Raincoat’ which sounds like some sort of prophylactic but aren’t.
I though I’d better check them to make sure they were wired up correctly and were working, they weren’t in both cases but are now.
So I’m all prepared for the new arrival and the excitement is mounting. I must say I rather missed this.
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I always make sure my speaker cables are a bit too long, as there is always some obstacle.
After opening the amp up to have fiddle with the gain jumpers on the desire, something didn’t look quite right inside - there are a bunch of mahoosive caps mounted to the base plate with flying wires going to pads on the main amp circuit board.
After wrenching my neck a bit to get a closer look i see written on one of them ‘k Gate’ so I’m guessing this one has had the black gate upgrade which makes it even more of a bargain.
It is a sensitive bugger though especially with my IPL’s even on low gain setting it’s painful to have the volume on the decade much above -40dBfs.
I’m really enjoying the presentation of the amp, completely opposite to the warm, slightly fuzzy, no detail Technics I’ve lived with for years. I’d wax lyrical about it’s abilities but just can’t be arsed, suffice to say I really like it and my main fear that it would crucify the spotify streams i usually listen to at work are unfounded, yes it sounds far better when fed with lossless FLAC’s but it’s still an enjoyable listen with whatever spotify can be bothered to provide me with.
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Right result - well-in 
Maybe get some 20dB line attenuators, like Rothwells? Would give you more control and less digital attenuation.
and less dynamics
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i tried some attenuators in the past and wasn’t overly taken with the results. I’ll live with things as they stand at present and if it becomes annoying I might look for a pre amp of some kind but i’ll have to build up some brownie points from her indoors before that gets sanctioned.
So my dac is single ended, my power amp is either. The power amp is more sensitive than a woman watching the notebook.
Completely mad idea but would using the balanced inputs on the power amp fed from single ended help with this. My limited understanding of how the signal is reconstructed from the dual differential signal suggests that the difference calculated between the non inverted signal and ground (single ended) and an inverted signal should mean a lower level seen by the amplification gubbins.
Of course I’m probably mental for even thinking this but could someone tell me I’m being a silly twat before I spend money or blow the amp up.
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No.