PrimaLuna

This company has just released its first hybrid tube/solid state power amplifier at $7199. The EVO 300 Hybrid Power Amplifier uses the same tube input gain-stage and very similar solid-state power amp gain-stage as their hybrid integrated amplifier. Too often, hybrid amps turn out to be less than the sum of their parts because of technical and sonic mismatches between the tube and solid-state circuits. It's essential to choose solid-state components that behave similarly to a tube. The PrimaLuna EVO 300 Hybrid Power Amplifier's MOSFETs, used in the power stages, share similar characteristics with tubes. These MOSFETs are specifically designed to pair with the company's most successful preamplifier stages, matched for the best sound quality possible and mounted in one chassis. The EVO 300 Hybrid Power Amplifier is unlike any other hybrid amplifier on the market. The input stages of the EVO 300 Hybrid use two 12AU7 tubes in the gain stages, and four 12AU7 driver tubes. The doubled driver tubes ensure a lower impedance to the output stages, allowing for large dynamics, a huge soundstage, and lots of beautiful harmonics and texture. The solid-state output stages use cascading JFETs from Linear Systems, and each channel boasts two complementary pairs of MOSFETs from Exicon. These MOSFETS are exotic, custom-designed and built, and are not available to anyone else. The setup is calibrated to offer the lowest impedance, and the 100 Watt/channel output into 8 Ohms (160 into 4 Ohms) power sounds massive, allowing this power amplifier to preserve tube glory while offering the excellent grip, low-bass power and control that MOSFETs are known for. The most crucial capacitors, the ones in the signal path, are extremely expensive tin-foil capacitors that are made in Europe. Even the capacitors outside the signal path are the top-quality models that modders use to upgrade their amplifiers.

The areas of construction, circuitry, and protection features are much the same as we've discussed for other PrimaLuna models in previous newsletters. These include such features as point-to-point wiring, the AC Offset Killer, Adaptive Autobias, super-high-quality parts, tube protection, and custom-built, low-noise transformers. Please don't hesitate to check out these previous write-ups for more details.