Moon's Six New Babies

You read it here first. After aeons of confusion over the Canadian company's name—is it Moon, is it Simaudio, or is it Simaudio by Moon?—our friends to the North are poised to finally resolve the issue. But before their Moon launch, they are launching their first new product range in 10 years, the upper-echelon North Collection. Consisting of three product groups, two in the 600 range, two in the 700, and two in the 800, all are full balanced designs.

Costa Koulisakis (above), the extremely knowledgeable and articulate public face of whatever they're called, began with the 641 all-analog, 125Wpc integrated amplifier ($11,000) and 681 streaming DAC ($12,000), which has fixed and variable outputs that does up to 32/384 MQA and DSD256. At the next performance level, there are the 791 streaming DAC/preamp with phono stage ($16,000) and all new 761 200Wpc, class-AB amplifier ($14,000). Finally, on top come the 891 streaming DAC/preamp with phono stage ($25,000) and 861 300Wpc stereo power amplifier ($22,000) that can also serve as one half of a monoblock configuration that outputs 900Wpc into 8 ohms.

The 861, which replaces the 860A v2 stereo amplifier that I reviewed in monoblock configuration less than a year ago, generates 150Wpc power more in monoblock mode than the older model. "It represents a big advance sonically," Koulisakis claimed, "because it contains our new MDCA Moon Distortion-Canceling Amplification circuit topology. It also uses no feedback; that means no feedback loop of any kind, neither global nor local." Koulisakis claims that the amp's distortion is lower, and that its bass is a little bit tighter and more accurate. Given that the 860A v2 sounded mighty fine, both in my listening room at shows, I'm eager to discover how the 861 monoblocks sound.

Moon also incorporates MDCA technology into its 761 and 641 amplifiers. All volume controls have evolved and now utilize higher precision semi-conductors.

COMMENTS
Herb Reichert's picture

with baby moons

h

NY State of Mind's picture

Surely you mean 32/384 PCM, right?
MQA source files are all 24/44.1 or 24/48kHz, the rest is upsampling.

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