What's the IC400?
Edit: Ahhh yes. But the number on the chip are the ones Doctormord is likely familiar with
Thanks for pointing this out, any more detailed pictures available?
Thanks for pointing this out, any more detailed pictures available?
No problem. I would love to compare to yours. They look nice and I like that you haven't sold out and still build with pride in Germany. Well I have a couple more.
Have you have heard the new nc502mp or the nc252mp ? I'm trying to choose between a 502mp and a pascal based multi channel. I already have an nc500 based unit and it is fantastic.
Which Ti chip is that? Can you give an impression as compare to others.
I am using the tpa3250 and I like it a lot.
Yes it's one of the 3 amps in the picture a few posts back. Get the Ncore MP's. No all in 1's currently available are as good.
It's the 3251. Well the chip is important. But I imagine the rest of the parts on that board have some impact on the end result as well. Icepower did an excellent job. They can afford to hire pretty good engineers. That amp should be used as a reference for all other TI chip based amps.
140x77x36.6. I like that the power supply is built in as well. Frequency response is very impressive for class D as well. A major area the ICCx falls short:
Attachments
That's the 100AS2. What's missing from that plot is the phase response.
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As I said earlier in the thread I have heard a Pascal based Gato amp and was not impressed lacked detail and wooly. The NCXXXMP sound superb very very close to a standard buffered NC500,
Yes if an all in 1 is a must for your application, hard to do better than the MP series. The NC-500 has much more versatility, and can be used as a building block component to achieve a much higher level of sound. But not at anywhere near the same cost and convenience of an all in 1 module.
They are OEM only. And must buy in cases of 400 unit minimum for these guys. I'm temped to buy a case, but really just like the Ncores, you need a very good front end paired with them to make them really shine.
Then there's a huge mismatch in price. I had planned at 1 point to make tiny little monoblock's in very nice little cases, with Furutech binding posts, OCC internal wiring with these and sell them for $500 a piece. But if paired with a $1000 front end, it would only sound like a $2000 system. On the other hand if you paired them with a $5000 front end, it would sound like a $10000 system.
But the problem is folks looking for a $5000 front end, don't shop for $1000 amps. As class D amps keep getting better and cheaper, the old school of spending equal on amps as the front end no longer applies. Because it costs way more to buy a front end that sounds good enough to be amplified unvarnished, and appeal to audiophiles.
The biggest complaint you hear about the Ncore's are not due to the Ncore's. It's due to the fact that the resolution is so high that all of the flaws in the front end are highlighted. So the amps end up taking the blame for the mediocre front end. They swap back the heavily voiced, low resolution amp they're used to, and all the flaws once again get buried in the hash. This is why I won't build a stand alone amp. As far as I'm concerned, a system should be built as 1.
I'm talking about digital front end. But both the Ncore amps and this Icepower 100as have analog inputs. So you must have a DAC before the amps.
The feedback loop in the ncores is analog (and the feedback loop is pretty much the core of the whole ncore design).
Yeah the signal becomes analog at some point. The quality of the signal at that point is what matters to me. I'm not aware of any speaker drivers with digital inputs.
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