I like music in my house and have a mild audiophile fetish, not as bad as some, but enough. I wanted a nice system for the main living room that would be used for background music, the loud stuff being out on the deck, or in the home theatre room. Despite being quiet, it still had to be “nice”.
It also needed to be small an un-intrusive, and fit on some small bookshelves. This ruled out most amplifiers, as they just don’t come in small sizes.
For the speakers I settled on a set of Paradigm Atom bookshelf speakers as reviewed here. Steve at Eastwood HiFi was most helpful and I recommend them and his entertaining site.
I initially considered a Fatman Valve Amp to power it, but with my green bent, the inherent inefficiency of vacuum tubes, and the cost, I looked at other solutions.
The T-Amp got amazing reviews and some impressive comparisons in it’s various incantations based on the Tripath Chip Class T Amp.
I picked up a Gen2 T-Amp from eBay.com for US$60 plus postage. The power adapter was full multi-voltage / multi-frequency and worked on Australian power. The unit is TINY, you can see from the pics below how small it is.
Once powered up, I connected the iPod and started to test. I was initially concerned that the 90db efficiency of the Paradigm speakers wouldn’t be sensitive enough to get reasonable volume from the meager clean 10w/channel and 15w maximum.
Amazed is an understatement. The volume is more than acceptable, although not ear shatteringly loud, it’s more than loud enough you can’t talk over it. Beautifully clear, and very simple and clean. The efficiency must be well over 90%, as several hours in, there was no heat from the amp whatsoever.
This thing gets my vote, beautiful clean power, dirt cheap price, tiny size, and as eco friendly efficient as you can get.
I’m very impressed.
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