Solid State Power Amp Reviews

Bogolu Haranath wrote:

If you (JA2) do a follow-up review of JC1+, may be you could also do a review of the Parasound top model, JC2 BP pre-amp ($4,500) :-)

Kal Rubinson reviewed the Halo JC2 BP in 2011. See www.stereophile.com/content/music-round-47-page-3.

John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile

Two comments:

1. There are precious few companies making JFETs these days. The market just isn't there. This is especially true for P-channel devices, which are harder to make with low noise properties. Most of the JFETs available now are based on decades old processes that have been kept alive for some high priority customers. That doesn't include the audiophile product business.

Linear Systems has really done yeoman's work in providing JFETs for specialized industries. At least in the JFET world relevant to this discussion, much of their activity has been to clone the Toshiba designs. It's hard, again especially for P-channel devices. Toshiba had the process knocked, and produced them by the freight car load. There was that much demand and the prices were quite literally pennies per transistor. Linear Systems doesn't have that available market, so the prices are inevitably going to be much higher, both due to basic economics and the yield challenges. (You make a zillion devices and you learn the subtleties of the recipe.)

The trend now is for entire systems to be built into a single chip. That's where the money is. If a company gets a design win for a single cell phone audio system, that's bigger for that semiconductor company than if they got every sale of every semiconductor for the entire specialty audio market. By a large factor.

Something to consider...

2. Along the same lines, consider the age demographic of the guys (it's almost exclusively men) who are doing analog design for audio. It pretty much parallels the age demographic of the people who buy the finished product. What will happen when they decide to retire?

When I was in college, at your basic nerd school, it seemed like every EE major wanted to go into the audio business. Of the entire student body when I was there, as far as I know a total of three did go into the audio business. They all were management engineering majors, and the three focused on the business subjects that were part of that curriculum.

With the consolidation of system functions onto a single chip, that means that far fewer analog design guys are needed. That's been the trend for a while. The semiconductor providers also do much of the design work so that their customers don't need many analog design guys, not only for audio but for any analog application. That's probably a good thing, in a way, since the young people studying electrical engineering mostly aren't all that interested in analog or RF design. It's the circle of supply and demand.

Something else to consider...

Bridged AHB2s cost less than Pass XA60.8 or JC1+ :-) ........