Article updated with measurement comments. New photos of DIY kits added.
As Hypex makes it clear (see interview) this is not the company's latest NCOREx technology which was announced last month. In fact, Nilai is a completely new amplifier technology. And as such, it is 10 times better than the original Ncore!
"We are extremely excited to announce this completely new Nilai Class D technology and a completely new amplifier module, the Nilai500DIY, for the DIY community. We have taken our exciting control-loop topology to a whole new level resulting in an immense performance upgrade compared to Ncore. The overall performance has increased by not less than 10 times!", says Hypex.
According to the company's R&D team, the massive performance — verified in the first production samples of the new Nilai500DIY module — boost results in distortion figures "that are 10 times lower, a power supply noise rejection that is 10 times higher and a reduced output impedance that has dropped by a factor of 10. These figures may already sound incredible, wait until you hear them come alive through your speakers!"
As audioXpress was still working on the announcement of the latest NCx500 OEM module - as exciting as that new product already is - we learned that something else was in the works, and the only reason why it was kept as a secret was because the R&D team wanted to verify all the measurements directly from the first units out of the factory and not prototypes. As soon as those samples were available, Hypex finally shared some of those results, which we are using to illustrate this story.
"Today, 20 years after the launch of our very first Class D amplifier, we want to thank the DIY-community that has always been very loyal to us. Their support played a very important role in our company’s success. We therefore thought that letting them be the first to exclusively try out this new technology was the right thing to do!," says Jan-Willem Winters, which was very recently appointed Hypex Electronics BV new CEO, and which has been leading the company's R&D efforts for the past five years, and has been with the company for nearly 12 years.
The new Nilai500DIY module comes with a discrete buffer stage and voltage regulators, just like the NC400 it will be replacing. "Together with carefully selected high-grade components, the Nilai500DIY is our best amplifier to date. Besides the amplifier, we designed a new power supply to match. The PS500DIY includes a PFC and standby power supply. Just like on the Nilai500DIY we selected high-grade components for optimized performance," added Niels Burema, account manager at Hypex Electronics. "As you can see, we created a truly special technique which sets a new benchmark for high-end audio applications and a unique amplifier module for our DIY community."
Detailing the specifications, the Nilai500DIY can deliver 500W with 1% THD @4 Ohms, as stated earlier, but the input gain can be adjusted with jumpers in 3 different settings (11,8, 21,8 & 27,8 dB). With the lowest gain setting of 11,8 dB, it is possible to achieve the lowest output noise which is 9,5 µV. This is including buffer stage and everything else. Not just the power stage. The THD+N at 100W in 4 ohms is a very low 0,00015% from 20 – 20.000Hz, which comes down to a signal to noise ratio of -116dB. With idle losses of only 2,2W compared to 4,5W for the existing NC400 module, Hypex also managed to get the heat dissipation much lower. Again, this is including buffer stage. The output impedance of the Nilai500DIY is <50 µOhm @ 1kHz.
Overall, the basic measurements shown above indicate extraordinary performance, an order of magnitude better than any amplifier we have tested to date, with noise low enough for headphone use and distortion challenging the very best test equipment. It will be interesting to see how these amplifiers perform in a broader measurement suite, including complex loads. Something that audioXpress will do as soon as the module reaches our test bench.
More Details About DIY
Trying to get a better sense of how important this new DIY amplifier module is for the company, audioXpress discussed this strategy with Niels Burema, which has long been the more visible face of Hypex Electronics at trade shows, and together with the sales team leads all the business efforts, marketing and sales for the company.
"The DIY audio market is indeed very important for Hypex," Niels Burema says. "Altough it represents just around 10 to 15% of the company's turnover, we do a lot of direct sales through our own dedicated website, which is really nice to have. The DIY community has always been very good to us in terms of the recognition, and promoting the quality of our products.
"It's been about 20 years since we launched our first class D module, the UcD. The first modules were only for OEM. But we got a lot of attention from the DIY markets. So we thought, well, let's create something specially for the DIY community as well. From the start, we created modules for the DIY community, and we kept the OEM market separated.
"We are always investigating to see what we can do at the high end for this topology, and see what we can improve. So, around two years ago, when we had already started developing NCOREx, we found good improvements in audio performance, including on the idle losses, and of course our R&D department — especially a few guys like Frank Veldman, who is now behind these new technologies and never stops researching improvements — found something really clever in the circuitry that we could do in a completely different way than we previously had done. And we could achieve indeed ten times better specs than NCORE," adds Burema.
And of course there will be DIY kits...
"We are going to launch also a DIY kit to build a preamplifier, and you will be able to build a stereo setup or a mono setup. Just like we did for the NC400, for the Nilai500DIY we will launch a mono kit and a stereo kit. The stereo kit is in the same shape chassis as the DIY Preamplifier kit. You will have all the parts to build those. And so you can have a stack of them if you buy both kits. The stereo amplifier and the preamplifier are completely custom made, with its own power supply. The basic preamplifier will just be analog inputs and outputs, and we've borrowed a bit of the technology we already invented and implemented in our high end Hypex developments for finished products. Of course, we want to give the DIY community the best possible technology, quality and sound," Niels Burema concludes.
www.hypex.nl
www.diyclassd.com
