Classe Audio CA-5100 owner manual Special Design Features, Extensive listening tests

highly refined circuit design

extensive listening tests

Special Design Features

All Classé analog amplification stages are based on circuits that have been extensively optimized over many years of continuous development.

By starting with excellent circuit designs and working with them over the years, we are able to discover the many small refinements that add up to superlative performance, in a variety of applications. Altering a voltage here, or using a slightly different part there, may make all the difference between solid and absolutely outstanding performance.

This level of refinement only comes with a great deal of experience, and is not available to those who flit from one trendy notion to the next. It accounts in no small measure for both the consistency of sonic performance among Classé products (as they are all based on similar analog gain stages), and for the consistently excellent reviews those products receive by owners and reviewers alike.

Excellent measured performance is to be expected in world-class products, and Classé products deliver that performance. However, experience has shown that technical excellence alone is insufficient to guarantee subjectively musical results.

For this reason, all Classé products are laboriously fine-tuned during the development process by carefully controlled listening tests. Our ears are still some of the finest laboratory test instruments available, and nicely complement more traditional engineering test equipment. In the course of optimizing the circuitry for a product, hundreds of decisions are made based on the subjective impression given by substituting one high quality part for another.

As an example, we may listen to half a dozen 0.1% film resistors of the same value, from several different companies. Standard tests may show them all to provide identical results in terms of noise, distortion, and so forth. Yet, almost invariably, one selection yields some small improvement in the subjective reaction to the performance of the product under development. Less often, even a single such change can result in a surprisingly large improvement.

Multiply those various improvements by the dozens or even hundreds of such decisions that must be made before the product can be finalized for production, and you have a remarkable improvement, indeed—all based on careful listening tests, which we view as a necessary complement to the solid engineering you might rightly expect from Classé.

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