First Impressions

I listened to the Sonic amp for the first time on my home system. I hooked it up briefly to my passive Vifa/Dayton 2 way speakers. The amp sounded pretty good on television sound - it worked. =)

Then I took it to work and ran it on my system there for about 4 1/2 hours until the AA batteries gave out. Interesting that all of sudden it started to distort badly. Turning down the volume eliminated the distortion. I had been running it flat out, just under audible distortion, maybe 5 or 6 watts constant. The case was warm on the top. The batteries measured 1.3 volts a few minutes after stopping. They had probably come back up a bit in that time.

The above test was run on my big (4 ft^3) passive 2 way boxes (Dayton/ScanSpeak) that I use at work. They give somewhere around 94~96 dB/watt, so need a lot less power than the 2 ways at home. BUT... I have 42,000 cubic feet to fill! The little amp did OK. Not enough power, but almost. It pushed the speakers pretty loud without awful distortion.

Bringing the level up a few dB to where I usually listen drove the amp into very ugly distortion. FYI, I normally drive the system with an 80's vintage Pioneer receiver. It's a transistor amp with somewhere around 90 watts per channel. Sounds nice, plenty of power for my use. The average listening level at work is in the mid 90s dB.

No input signal. Switching waveform before filtering. ~800 kHz 2VDC/div.

What I found, subjectively, is that the Sonic Tripath has a very pleasant sound. Lots of detail compared to my Vintage Sansui, Harmon Kardon or Pioneer. The Sonic doesn't have a lot of bass, but that may be due to its lack of power.* The 12" woofers at work are 4 ohm, so will suck up the power. Listening at home on a smaller set of 2 ways will let me know better about low end. My home speaks are about as efficient as average, 84dB/watt.

Home is a much smaller space to fill, about 1850^3' or 1/22 the volume of the work space. (Given the same speakers, would it take 22x more power to fill a space 22x larger? I don't know).

1Khz 1 Watt. 8 ohms.

summary:

Out of the box the Sonic is a decent sounding amp, plenty of mid range detail, not a lot of power or bass. It seems to do really well on percussion, e.g. bells, vibraphone, wood block, bongos. In stock form it can be fatiguing to listen to for long.