Ray,
It is difficult to answer your points as you seem to regard the range entirely in commercial terms, perhaps not being aware of how the designs evolved over the years of R&D, and just what I was trying to achieve sonically.
I'm not even sure my description would satisfy you; you are a talkative fellow and will likely want a dialogue on the matter, something I'm reluctant to indulge because I see it as time intensive, something I'm short on. Furthermore, I see personal explanation in dangerous terms; you must realise my ideas and designs are ridiculed by many, and I can't be bothered justifying my position these days. Any wins are pyrrhic; the war continues regardless. My designs are what they are, of course, and that is the end of it. Unfortunately, I have not been sufficiently private to keep my name anonymous.
The AKSA came first. It was an attempt to properly tune a good commercial design originally penned in the fifties and sixties by Arthur Bailey and Harry C. Lin. While the intent was to produce a good kit with some commercial pretensions it was not designed to make me wealthy. I am semi-retired, have enjoyed a good career in the military, and I'm about as ambitious for high income as a garden snail. However, I must have hit a chord with buyers because the AKSA sold by the hundreds. It gave me confidence to continue my R&D, something I live for, and after a couple more years I produced the first Lifeforce. That was 2002.
Two issues arose. The first was the gargantuan email load kitset sales quickly imposed. At one point I answered around 50 emails a day, and this persisted for years, not months. To this day I service the AKSA still. I type quickly and I do enjoy people, but this was ridiculous. The second issue was the heavy workload; assembling 5-10 kits each week was a lot of work, prone to error, with QC inventory issues. I did employ people on a part time basis, but was never prepared to borrow and invest in such an unpredictable market. This strategy was subsequently vindicated when the GFC struck and most US sales all but dried up. So I decided to personally build complete modules, and sell them for customer installation into a case, modules tested and ready to run. I raised the price to reflect hand building and to move away from the bottom end of the market (which is deeply problematic, by the way). Predictably, sales diminished, not too much, but most of all I again had a life. My children were then in their teens, they needed their Mom and Dad, and God was in his heaven. The Lifeforce was very successful as it solved two of the primary issues of all SS amplifiers; the accurate extraction of the error signal at the front end and the perception of image depth. My design successes were building, and in 2006 I began to indulge more R&D, leading to the first Soraya, which was developed with strong input from Colin Brown in Vancouver.
The first Soraya, named after my eldest daughter (who is academically brilliant), was an innovative, original development of the original Lifeforce, and was a very good amp with strong engagement and outstanding image focus, depth and clarity. This became a full retail product, plug 'n play, but because of the much increased hardware (trafos, cases, terminations, etc) and the warranty and marketing costs, it was not cheap.
I would stress here that I was focussing entirely on subjective aspects of listening, rather than the traditional engineering notions of measurement. I felt that greater minds than mine had adopted the latter strategy, seemingly without always succeeding, and in my esimation the aspect of subjective design had been neglected. This conclusion never pleases purely technical designers, but it has certainly delighted lots of happy customers. There is no smugness in this; merely the observation that it has been a neglected design approach, particularly in the English speaking world. I say this because I know that in Italy, for example, there is enormous care given to the subjective issues - this from my occasional Italian customers. The luminous point I make here is that amps are for humans, not for test gear, and the perceptions and tastes vary considerably, rather like food and fashion. To this day, the connection between test results and subjective listening assessment remains tenuous at best, and utterly perplexing at worst.
The NAKSA was developed principally by me but with help from Romeo Tiu in Italy, Russ Bayliss in Melbourne, and Omar El Shacker in Jordan (thanks guys!!). The entire cycle took about eight months and focussed on an austerity model with outstanding subjective presentation for tough economic times. How was I to know that by this stage, having paid my dues, I was really starting to nail things and it would sound so good? As I write a NAKSA 100 is belting out the music at CES in Las Vegas, let us hope it does well! The NAKSA is probably the best generalist amp I have ever done; it's particularly good on pop, electronic, vocal and jazz, just as Hans has said, and it has class leading bass, midrange and stunning resolution.
The last amp I have developed, and Afterimage on this forum is my first US customer, is the Maya CB280. This too was developed with Colin in Canada, and is truly exceptional. It is more polished than the NAKSA, even the 100 (which Hans has not heard), and it is completely invisible in operation on almost any genre. One of my bat eared beta guys here in Melbourne, another Russell, is over the moon about the Maya; he says it is utterly transparent, completely natural and real in its presentation, with subliminally powerful engagement. He also loves the NAKSA 100 and in fact owns my prototype. These are just words and give little indication of the reality, of course; the lack of proper audition makes it so difficult to sell these products. But it's in a different class to the NAKSA, I can assure you, and this is no way reflects badly on the NAKSA, which is extraordinary.
Naturally the Maya is rather pricey. We live in a commoditized world where every product, right or wrong, is assessed on 'value' and pidgeon holed into a 'price bracket'. I have never enjoyed working for $5 an hour; so, with pride, and some resolve, I raise the price to give me reasonable return on my efforts, which have been, over the years, passionate and intensive.
Hope this helps you divine my mindset, Ray!
Cheers,
Hugh
