zappulse evaluation kit

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I'm Perfectly Serious

Hello Km, I am sure we are all interested to hear reviews, good or bad regarding your amplifier.
Can you give us links to any such reviews ?.
What is the duty free price of your modules ?


Regards, Eric.

PS - My ex is in DK right now, and I could send her around to grab a couple if I can gain some opinions of your amp - OTOH I can get B&O modules locally too.
You have about 1 week to sell to me before she is coming back.
I have have had only a brief listen to the IcePower modules, and not under ideal conditions or on music that I know, so at present I am unable to give any serious critique but soon (next few weeks) I will have a proper extended listening session, and likely report my findings.
 
hi.

first of all thanks for your interest.

you seem to have got the impression that i wrote here to sell some of our modules.

im sorry if i disappoint you but this is not the case.

i have worked with the technology for some years now and yes we do have a couple of solutions that we think perform quite well and solve some of the problems involved.

of course im interested in what others are doing in this field and im disappointed to read some of the bull**** that i read , no matter if its about the icepower modules or about the lc audio ones.

at this point we have made a couple of finished products (if you are into pro audio you can find a small review on our site) and we have sold amplifier modules and switch mode supplies to a number of oem customers only, if that changes in the future i can let you know.

we have some of the tripath boards at work (the 0103 - 2x250w types) and they got quite good reviews in hifi magazine here as did the finished amplifiers using same chipset/boards/technology.

regards - k madsen - cadaudio.dk
 
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ZapPulse on test

Hi!
I have just finished one of my ZapPulse projects, and it is
playing very well.
Finally, it seems that my heater (Class A) can relax in the
summertime!

Arne K
NORWAY
 

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Zap......

I think the modules cost me ca. U.S. $ 340 and their new power-supply cost me ca. $ 270.

It makes the installation easy. It has 10 x 10 000uF 63V caps, a mains-filter and a soft-start.

Chassis is from THL Audio.

I'm in the process of "burning it in" with the help of my Apogee Duetta speakers (tough load), and so far, it plays well!

Arne Karlsen
Norway
 
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mini review

Hi, all!

Have been listening and comparing my new amp. now, and I'm pleased w. the result.

I do not think you can buy the sound-quality for less than twice the price!...but then again, it did definetely lag behind my Dynamic Precision Class A amp. (more than 4 x price of ZapPulse).

I have read that LC-Audio is planning a upgrade filter-coil (and caps?) for later...maybe it would help.
Bass was a bit "loose" compared to my other amp.

Arne K
 
Thanks to Bl**ker for showing me this thread.

It was true the first versions of ZAPpulse had big problems with EMI emissions. The big AIR coil made FM radio reception within a range of 10m from the amplifier almost impossible.

Today 2 years later we have adressed this problem seriously , to a point where our 2.1 SE (with 4 layer circuit board) has almost no noise problem.
In our workshop we have an FM tuner (shown on picture below). In front you see a 2.1 module, playing background music in our workshop. The FM tuner has only the green wire as antenna, and even thouhg the wire passes right over the 2.1SE module, you hear no noise at all.
It is a 50 Watt setup, so it needs no heatsinking at all, that's why it can safely float in the air like this.

In the next version 2.2SE we will have further reduced EMI to a level comparable with a normal computer Harddrive.

Sorry about the dust on the shelf, it has been sitting there in our production shop and playing every day for about 6 months now.
Cleaning is not my strongest side

:D
 

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Update:

I have not been so lucky, still having some RFI-problems.
Input (signal-) trafos did help some.
And I find the amp. very sensitive to PSU-capasitor-type, good or bad?
You can "tune" the amps sound with different caps.
Large differences!
Also with "BlackGate" 2.1 SE version.

Arne K
 
Hi,
My first project had some problems with noise, and I also had some problems with the V4P psu. But now it plays very vell.
I just startet building a couple of new zappulses (I want to go for a biamping set)
I have tried out several PSU caps with these kits. The ones that I liked was of course Rifa PEH169 (good lower bass) Siemens Sikorel (nice fast midbass) but the ones I liked the most was Elna Cerafine caps. They make the Zappulse play with such an ease and musicality. Also I swapped my former GBPS 3510 bridges with (8 pcs) BYV79E diode bridgeconfiguration. That also helps in my opinion.
The cabinets are still under development :D
 

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in your experiments with PSU caps, did you ever try bypassing the caps with a smaller cap, like some Wimas?

I'm considering to build a pair of amps with 4 SE modules in each to biamp (2x2bridged) or triamp (1 for tweeter 1 for mid and bridged for bass) my magnepan speakers.

Given this will be a rather expensive project, I want to make sure I do my homework regarding the power supplies first

Peter
 
bambadoo said:
Yes I tried (Rifa PHE 450, 0.1 uF), but didn't hear any difference.
I also tried with som polyoprops.
You can read alot of interesting things regarding psu here:
http://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/ssps1_e.html

Regards


great link - just what I have been looking for to finally figure out all this power supply magic before buying fancy parts and sending them up in smoke
:D
 
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