RATING
LET’S FACE IT, amplifiers are a necessary evil. Unless you’re listening to a crystal radio through a flesh-colored earphone, you’re not going to hear much of anything without at least one amplifier between the music and your ears.
The amplifier’s job is pretty simple: “make bigger but don’t change anything.” But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Audio designers have been wrestling with amplifier types and topologies for more than a century, balancing power, size, weight, heat, and cost in near-endless iterations. Then along came class D, which upended the juggling match, combining new highs (power) and potential lows (all the rest) in one small package. And don’t call it digital, ’cause it’s not—there’s no quantization per se—but that’s a story for another time.
Exhibit A: the new A35.8 power amplifier from Sweden’s Primare. It employs an octet of Hypex Ncore (NC500) class-D modules, with Primare’s own power-supply, input, and heat-sink refinements, to provide channels of power, each capable of dumping up to 150 watts into 8-ohm loads (or 400 watts into 2 ohms), from a chassis that’s smaller and lighter—though at 33 pounds, not exactly featherweight—than many a stereo power amp. (Hypex
