Hifi & records – 01/2015
Continuity
Test: power amp Accuphase A-70
Perfect technology-transfer: the A-70 profits strongly from the innovations, which Accuphase developed with the Mono blocks from A-200.
The age of information doesn’t just cause enthusiasm but also in some places discomfort. Hence the technical progress isn’t much different from the Euro. There is so much what was yesterday’s matter of fact is suddenly called into question. But from the hard times, which people like to forget about, was already the talk even before the Lehman-bankruptcy and the sovereign debt crisis. What remains after all this is the vague feeling, that there is something wrong – when tectonic shifts cause the floor under one’s feet to move, it is easy to lose footing.
Even the High Fidelity is currently being completely revised. Therefore, don’t we as well need dependable light houses to show us the way? Institutions, that preserve the high end spirit instead of exploit it, who don’t follow every trend, stand for something and have proven this on more than one occasion. Those are admittedly rare, but there is one name that comes to mind: Accuphase.
That is less because of the tradition of the machines with the champagne colored fronts, but more because of the continuity, which Accuphase demonstrates daily. This continuity is rooted in the permanent strive for improvement, the imploring effort to offer the customer an even better equivalent.
In the colorful market nowadays such a mindset is anything but self-evident. Probably the social education worker Mr. Gmeiner is right: ”Everything big in our world only happens, because someone does more than he or she must.”
Accuphase has in the last years presented a complete line of reference-products, sinfully expensive, but also absolutely fantastic. The end of the line is made of the class-A mono blocks A-200 (Magazine 2/2013), with which Accuphase has made again a decisive step forward. The nice thing about such for us average mortals “unreachable” products is that they act indeed as technological-godfathers in Yokohama and not only on paper: the A-200 monos delivered the exact blueprint for the revision of the Stereo-poweramp A-65 to A-70.
Even their predecessors already counted to the Accuphase classics par excellence, which considerably contributed to making the class-A-technique through perfect operating reliability completely socially acceptable. The round dance was opened by the A-50 in the year of 1993. Since then Japan’s big class- A-Stereo-power amp has every five years been revised and refined. Not only in the technical department but also the appearance has progressed. The A-65 and the new A-70 are instead almost identical. Also the fundamental amplifying concept is the same: 10 pairs Mosfet-Endtransistors (K3497 and J618) provide full capacity, on their side is a central organized, capsuled toroidaltransformer and two large Elkos with unchanged 82.000 Mikrofarad capacity each. The class-A section lies still at 60 Watt at eight Ohm, from this current feedback Accuphase promises itself a highly accurate phase.
New is with A-200 incorporated “Gain-Management” which means: Which section amplifies how much, how does one distribute the work for the input and capacity amplifying levels? Accuphase used to incorporate very classic comparable amplifying factors, 12 dB in the input, 16 dB in the output. But
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