by Rafe Arnott
Things that annoy me:
- People who stand on the left side of escalators (this is the passing lane people).
- Mouth breathers.
- Class-D amplifiers.
- People who add an apostrophe to everything that ends with “s” – speaker’s, dog’s, asshole’s.
- People who say “punches above its weight” when referring to audio gear that is more affordable than anything else in the same class.
So, I’m going to annoy the hell out of myself, and perhaps you, and say that the Your Final System/Channel Island Audio room was producing a sound at T.H.E. Show that punched way above its weight.
This is doubly annoying to me because Channel Island was using the E 200S dual mono (200 watts/8 ohms, 400 watts/4 ohms) Class-D amplifier ($2,500 US) to supply the juice through their PLC-1 MKII Passive Line Controller ($899 US) and Transient MKII USB DAC ($699 US) into a pair of prototype speakers that Channel Island’s Dustin Vawter kept telling me “were not for sale.”
The tunes were flowing from the YFS modified Mac Mini (with16 GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD drive stuffed into it) that also sported a YFS ($375 US, owner-installed) internal power filter and PS-12m Linear Power Supply ($1,895 US, external).
The sound being produced from this kit was fun, punchy and colored in a way that I usually associate with Class-A (which means it sounded like real instruments being played and real voices singing, not a digital approximation).
Vawter described the prototype speakers as “…almost like a Transmission Line in a really small box.” You’ve been warned.
I hope these come out soon for sale, so I can breathe through my mouth before I ask for a review pair.
