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WHAT'S NEW
Newform Research Update - Aug 2003
Written by John MeyerLet’s get right to the main event. The major chip companies have had a hard last few years. The chip downturn has hampered many digital amp development programs. However, after 6 years of false starts, dropped programs and delays, Newform finally has a digital amplifier system that is ready to go, is incredibly cheap and offers superb performance. Anyone who has a lot of experience in audio will take quite a while to digest what follows. There are several major incongruities that will only be reconciled by time and listening. The over used term "paradigm shift" actually does apply here.
The Background
Four years ago at the CES in Las Vegas I spent an afternoon in a hotel room with the Texas Instruments (TI) digital amplifier development team. They had wanted to get my response to their development platform and direction and hear about the pitfalls encountered by other companies who had tried and given up on digital amps.They were certainly a very sharp and well grounded group of individuals and they had Tis backing to make digital amplifiers work. TIs commitment included their own talented people, an audiophile product designer and whatever outside expertise or companies they had to buy to get the job done. Outstanding talent, incredible technical resources, patience and deep pockets have combined to produce the desired results.
But back to Las Vegas. The team had an early prototype of a digital amplifier with a digital power supply. At 12 watts, it sounded fine with that fundamental digital amp sound source resolution that Spectron has so clearly demonstrated for years. Beyond that, you couldn’t tell much with a pair of micro speakers set up randomly on the dining room table of a hotel suite. The package was interesting though as it was very small and lightweight with no transformers or large caps.
Two years later, I was informed that one of their large development partners (Panasonic) was working on a 6 channel x 100w product which would make it to market eventually. Well, it is here now and it (the Panasonic XR45 6 channel receiver) serves notice that the all-digital chain has landed.
What is the Panasonic XR45 and better yet, who (in audiophile terms) is Panasonic? Panasonic is a division of Matsushita Electronics, one of the largest companies on the planet with 290,000 employees. In the early ‘80s Matsushita presented their calling card at the Chicago Audio Show with a display of close to 10,000 square feet featuring Japanese art, waterfalls and no products. The message of a long term outlook and a huge background presence was subtle, powerful and unforgettable.
To me, Panasonic, besides making the most advanced electric assist (pedelec) bicycles, is fax machines and telephones. Despite some very decent sounding DVD players, its audio gear is low to mid-fi at best. The XR45 does not change that market focus in the least. At 3" high, weighing 9 pounds (no transformers, no external heat sinks and no large caps are responsible for this) and with a street price of under $400US, the XR45 will not appear as a life form to any audiophile on this planet.
Few audiophiles will stumble on and embrace the XR45. And certainly not in public.
“Say George, I just traded in my $8000, 200 pound Krells for a 9 pound, 3" high Panasonic receiver. Would you like to come over and listen to it?”
“No Tony, it’s OK, I have to cut my cats nails right now and then my wife and I are going on 2 year world tour so you don’t need to try calling me again. Ever.”
Even Panasonic isn’t making it easy. Fire up the XR45 out of the box and it sounds like the cheapo receiver you expect it to be. Thin sounding, with no bottom end whatsoever. I have worked with enough TI digital amp evaluation boards and prototypes to know that the sound had to be better than that.
The factory defaults appear to be surround sound with some type of trick “enhancements” and a 100Hz subwoofer filter. The factory obviously assumes that it will fulfill it’s lowball mission of driving a cheap set of speakers and subwoofer in a “venue” (hall, movie theater, tavern, grotto ) surround mode. After fighting my way through the menu system for 90 minutes, I was able to arrive at a simple, unfiltered, modeless and unenhanced stereo configuration.
The result was a truly amazing bottom end normally delivered only by the likes of Spectron, Classe, Bryston etc.. Deep, powerful bass with superb pitch definition out of a 9 pound package. It was many days before I could stop gazing in wonder at the XR45 every so often during listening sessions. Even with my background of digital amp evangelism, the hearing and the seeing requires a radical mental re-alignment.
As a low end piece of gear, the XR45 wears the part well. Let’s first grimace at the specs. 105 watts per channel into 6 ohms at 1kHz, with 0.3% distortion. This sort of spec phrasing is what you would expect during the ‘70s when some manufactures marketing departments gave power figures that could only be achieved, going downhill with a tailwind during a lightning storm. Bryston would probably rate this at 17 watts (joking!).
Specs here simply do not give any indication of the sound quality. Once the industry is more comfortable with digital amps, which simply do not spec out as well as the best A/B amps, the whole distortion perception area should be revisited in depth by a qualified research team.
Stepping back a bit, the typical distortion/output curves for digital amps I’ve seen would probably put the XR45 at 75w/ch, 20 to 20kHz with .04% distortion. This would be a much better looking spec and more indicative of the listening experience but marketing departments like to go for that big fat 100w figure. I guess it sells better to their target demographic.
But the XR45 plays very loudly and very cleanly and due to its digital brain, clipping is extremely graceful and in fact almost impossible to perceive. NAD put a lot of work into its amps to take the edge off clipping without hurting the music and they were the best at it in solid state amps but XR45 is downright tube-like in this area. In any case, there is more than enough power to light up our 22'x23' big room with the 645s biamped (using 4 of the XR45s 6 channels).
Partly due to cost and partly due to the lack of rear panel real estate, only the main speakers get binding post terminals. The other 4 channels get pretty well thought out micro clamp terminals for bare wire ends. These couldn’t cost more than 4 cents each and they do save a great deal of space. The wire end has to be small enough to fit though. The tiny gauge power cord is one of those things with one side rounded and one side square plug. We are in video game player territory here. No high end magazine is going to review the XR45 but you can imagine the comments if they did? The snickering would be deafening. Who could blame them?
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