The problem of Warwick Aperio

[spritzer]

[spritzer]

A lot of money was spent on this and the amp is very nicely made in terms of the chassis design.  All of the panels are 8mm thick with very nice machining on them but to take all this effort and waste it on a fundamentally flawed driver design... is just beyond me. 

The analog inputs go through those four dual opamps per side before it goes to the AKM A/D converter.  The Xmos unit handles the USB a sample rate converter after it.  The SPDIF input has its own sample rate unit too and all of this feeds into the ESS dacs.  I always thought these would have a DSP but it appears to be all analog, unless there is a grunty chip hiding on the back of the board that I can't see.  

That does me we could make our own amps for these if we just clone the filtering circuit and add some adjustments to it.  Not sure if there is any demand for that though.