[English Translation Test Accuphase E-650 / image hifi 06(Nov/Dec.)/2018]
Forever Hanami
Would you like to know how Accuphase succeeds in making already great equipment even better with every new product generation? Then you can look forward to new insights.
A wonderful, big cherry tree stands in front of our house to the right of the little crate which houses the garbage cans. When it's in full bloom, I sometimes lay myself under that tree and watch the sun shining through its leaves, bestowing some kind of outerwordly character to this gift of nature. Sometimes I also carefully pick up a leaf to trace its infinite delicacy. The Japanese love the cherry blossom festival of Hanami,
because here beauty, in the form of the short blossoming, and transience by the imminent withering are so close to each other. Along with the cherry blossoms,
people now enjoy more pleasant temperatures and feel the awakening of Mother
Nature's forces. Sure, the cherry blossom of 2018 is long over, but these associations come to my mind while I'm lying on my back in the living room and,
amplified by the E-650, Pat Metheny's guitar notes on What's It All About (Nonesuch
4931741, CD, EU 2011) soar to the ceiling like little fireflies. I feel as if I could reach out for one of these tones, view its shimmer and shine from all sides. Yes, with the E650 you can celebrate your audiophile Hanami cherry blossom festival all year long.
The Accuphase E-650 is a classic integrated amplifier, fully equipped and ready for all possible applications with its two optional boards to which I'm going to return later.
Like all large Accuphase amplifiers it runs in class-A. With this operating mode, at least one amplifying component is permanently energized, which results in fewer crossover distortions and a better graded distortion spectrum. The drawbacks are a low efficiency and a very high temperature evolution. The E-650 puts out approximately 30 watts into 8 ohms, which is normally the end of the road for a classA amplifier; the famous Pioneer M-22 power amps or the classic Sugden amps from
England may serve as prominent comparative examples here. 30 watts in view of well over 25 kilograms of weight, thus casually formulated: just below one watt per kilo? This may seem to be paltry, but please forget those numbers games, for the E650 has enough power, a power which it skillfully uses and which enables it to perform sovereignly with very different loudspeakers. For instance with my LS3/5a which is known to be glad about every extra watt. In line with this is the following story the workshop manager of Accuphase distributor P.I.A. once told me: One day a big class-A power amplifier arrived on his workbench for a routine checkup, and he was wondering about the prominent customer, the Fraunhofer Institute. So he called there and asked them why they needed such a power amplifier. They replied that there wasn't any other device on the market which could be operated down to 1 ohm in such a stable manner like the Accuphase. And precisely this stability can be felt in virtually all situations you don't necessarily need to match it with extremely power hungry loudspeakers.
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The E-650 doesn't fully represent the pure class-A doctrine, for it isn't a single-ended,
but a push-pull amplifier and even one that runs in triple parallel push-pull mode. In single-ended mode its output power would be significantly lower, and so Accuphase combines its immanent beautiful sound, a trademark of their class-A amplifiers, with the typical orderliness and structure of good push-pull amps. It draws its power from the parallel layout of the MOSFETS, which are wired in such a manner that only a fraction of their potential maximum power is requested. The comparison with a sovereign 12-cylinder engine suggests itself, because the E-650 plays both dynamically agile and unexcitedly stable, thereby mastering two real supreme
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