Received my D200 safe and well (Thanks Dusty!). Setting it up, turning it on is one of the most fussless (is there such a word?) exercise I have encountered in my audio journey! The amber lights switched to blue (not too bright, not too dim but just nice blue) and simply glowed as if to say, "I am ready! Are you?" I held my breath and slowly cranked the volume up. Smooth. No glitch, no pop, no hum...nothing except music. Surprisingly, it sounded quite good straight out of the box! Within minutes, shuffling in and out and around my listening area, I was able to hear a pedigree-d sound emanating from my stubborn Thiels which reminded me of my 300B SET which I owned and endured (a decade of longsuffering before selling it and the aftermath pine for that elusive, magical sound that only tubes could satisfy).
Let me back track, circa last quarter 2005: What led me to the CIAudio D200? I scoured the internet, chanced upon this forum amongst others, voraciously read class D literature, mentally evaluated the comments of supporters, fence sitters and critics alike, compared similar or competitive offings. Then, mulled and mused. To be or not to be...Thumbed Greg Weaver's Dec 2005 Review front and back and back to front, read between the lines. Tried to digest Bruno Putzey's seminal paper (without a science background, it was tough but I think I barely comprehended) and read with interests Jan-Peter Van Amerongen's enthusiastic internet musings on class D and UcD technology. Further ruminations ensued...Greg threw (me) a challenge and implied I would be a fool if I were to dismiss this amplifier unworthy of my time solely by relying on conventional wisdom. Always game for a challenge, and not wanting the joke to be on me, I exchanged a few emails with Dusty to satisfy my need for some due diligence (and perhaps serve to justify a bad bargain should the purchase turn out otherwise) on my part and like a pig in a poke, took the plunge! If I bought the D200 and did not like the sound, I would consign them to my study or guest room and the diminutive real estate space and cube structure could look like a Zen piece of art on a shelf! For sure the sound would be infinitely better than a Bose Lifestyle system, and cheaper too! But if I liked it, boy, can you imagine how much real estate I would save, and picture the bewitched, bewildered looks of my audiophile friends when they ask what I use to drive my towering and stubborn Thiels? I would have replied, nothing fancy, just some off the shelf, discounted computer stuff! Was this some marketing hype that had the audacity to challenge established and accepted conventionality with hyperbolic claims of power, transparency and cool operation? My SHARP and TECHNICs portable lowfi that sounded so good and accompanied me through varsity days in the early 80s was probably some kind of Class D genre. Same way Class A/B challenged Class A! The diminutive size of the D200s did not instil much confidence (in fact it raised more doubts of what hid beneath its aluminium coat - spartan sparse but commendably neat? The innards of my son's MP3 would look more complicated on the inside!). How much did you say they cost? USD 2,200? That's a lot of greenbacks for so little. I looked inside my class A/B amplifier and felt more secure with the quantity and quality of electronic parts that bedecked the circuit board. More parts mean more obstruction to the shortest signal path! The shortest distance between two points is a straight line! Don't tell me this is another less is more product. If the transformer takes too much space horizontally and the signal path is longer, place it vertically! D'Bono and Lateral Thinking literally! Gosh, the D200 looked not much bigger than a pair of Bose cube speakers dressed in shining armour! Well the joke was on me, as Greg would have teased....yes I was the joker...until I auditioned the D200s some 6 weeks back. Skepticism. Disbelief. Incredulity. 325 watts into 4 ohms? Cool running? Small footprint? Damping factor > 1,000 (yes you read it right, no zeros are misplaced and there is no decimal point in between! How can all this be possible? A familiar CD played a trumpet blare. I could smell the brass. A bell went *ping*. I could feel the cup. A cymbal went crash. I could feel the clash of metal and the decay which followed. A drum brush skirted the cymbal with cascading crisp. I could feel the wire bristles shimmering as it skimmed the surface! A violin bow tarversed the strings. I could feel the vibration between the strings and sense the rosin. These are some musical cues that I value highly and use to gauge the quality of any system. All of these musical minutia became more real to me through the D200, and literally conveyed me vicariously to a much higher plane that was both musical and satisfying. As for voices, I have a rule of thumb of a good system. If you can follow the lyrics to a song or words in a conversation with ease; if you can clearly and distictly hear the articulation of words in a next room, beyond a wall, along the corridor away from the listening room, and hear all of this as if the singer or speaker is standing next to you, you have a good system. There must be no fuzziness, fudging, smearing, muffling, mumbling. Simply put, I feel fulfilled! I hope to post a follow up log after the D200 breaks in eventually. I hope then that I can put my experiences to words.
