Sweden's Marten is well-regarded for its high-end speakers and takes a fair amount of pride in their audiophile-pleasing performance. So it comes as no surprise to learn that the company has decided that the only way to ensure optimum sound for its products is to create its own amplifier. Introduced at this year's CES, the M-Amp Mono Power Amplifier uses a new technology called Adaptive Modulation Servo (AMS) that's said to provide a wide bandwidth, really low audio distortion and high power output.
The stylish M-Amp is the result of a joint venture between Marten's chief designer Leif Olofsson and founder of the Anaview AB design house and inventor of the new AMS feedback technology, Patrik Bostrom. The company describes its new power amp as having an "inverting globally self oscillating class D stage" at its core.
This class D stage is a "load independent, wide bandwidth first order modulator, switching at 600 kHz, with a constant loop gain of 30dB all the way up to the switching frequency."
The upshot of all that techspeak is that these 14.5 x 10.6 x 20.9-inch (370 x 270 x 530 mm), 103-pound (47-kg) babies can knock out 550W of power into eight ohms, 1000W into four ohms and 1700W into two ohms with total harmonic distortion (THD) of one percent. At lower power, the THD is reduced even further, going down as far as 0.0012 percent at 1W/8 ohms.
The company says that the elimination of modulation imperfections is due to the AMS drive being connected to the positive and negative inputs of the core modulation stage. The frequency response at the 20Hz to 20kHz audio range is reported to be +0/-0.05dB with a flat 20dB gain and just +0/-3 dB at the DC to 120kHz range.
Like all audiophile-grade equipment though, the M-Amp won't come cheap when it gets unleashed in March. Marten's U.S. distributor Dan Meinwald told Gizmag that "unless something changes when the amps go into full production (it happens), the price will be US$42,000/pair."