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"The only thing I should explain until the English owner's manual is back from the printer is about the automatic wake up/sleep function. Merak ships with this function enabled. To disable it, simply press and hold down the frontal power button whilst the unit is powered up. Once you see the LED flash, release the button. The unit will go into standby and this function is disabled. To activate it again, press and hold the button whilst the unit is in sleep mode. When you see the light flash, release the button and it is enabled again. The auto-off trigger is 5 minutes of no input signal. If you wake the enabled unit by manually pressing the button, it won't go to sleep automatically. What's more, if you put the unit to sleep by manually pressing the button, the unit won't wake up automatically unless the input signal disappears for a continuous 5 minutes. If you want it to wake up automatically immediately, you need to power off completely with the mains switch in the back and restart it again. This function is very smart and won't wake up the unit with anything but true music signal." - 王轩骞

Powering on the supremely sleek silver amps leashed to AudioSolutions' flagship Rhapsody 200, I was very impressed by how absolutely inaudible these high-power monos operated with my ear right on the tweeters. Mechanically a slight hum from in-rush current when the circuits first went live subsided to inaudible a few seconds later. Fabulous!

That particular f-word changed to another when one amp's core awoke from such laudably deep sleep to buzz loudly, then went properly asleep again as though I'd imagined it all. These snoring interludes would repeat at unpredictable intervals. I soon suspected UFO moments—unexplainable friggin' oops—related perhaps to intermittent DC incidents on the mains. That's a common cause of transformer hum after all. Of course with the second unit stoically immune, that was mere and perhaps even lame theory.

"If our toroids start to hum, it would be either from DC or overvoltage on the mains. Since the amps shut down above 240V the latter should be no issue. [GigaWatt's PC-3SE Evo conditioner with its voltage readout feeding my front-end components confirmed that my nominal 230V Swiss mains power never exceeded 237V - Ed]. We test extensively for DC mains effects. If the transformer hums loudly, DC has to exceed 4V. Though our toroids use narrow-band cores, Plitron assures us they are no more sensitive than others. In fact our Chinese mains supply isn't very good at all. Voltage is unstable, DC offset is serious with lots of attendant EMI. Hence we are twice cautious about any such conditions when we design all our products. It's exactly why we also implement the Purer-Power AC filter technology." - 王轩骞

During my review of the Polish powerline conditioner I'd asked its maker about filtering for DC. "Generally even the best and most expensive power toroids—especially high power above 500-700w—aren't resistant to hum from DC. We have huge experience in this area. It's why we resigned from transformers in our products. We used high-quality transformers before (700-1500w). Despite our best efforts we could never completely eliminate noise. Hum depends on many causes: AC sine wave distortion, slack in the transformer core (very often!) and DC current. DC filters can help but that depends on the build of a given transformer and other causes. For now our products don't eliminate DC because generally only a fraction of devices on the market hum. But we do plan to make such products in the future." Either way Xuanqian needed the unit back. If a slacking toroidal core or other mechanical failure was responsible, Plitron had to inspect the part to determine cause. I was impressed again with this very calm professional response and shortly after TNT whisked off the unit to China.

10 days later I had it back with a new transformer even though AURALiC couldn't replicate the behavior on their bench. For me it was problem solved as the new toroid was quiet. For them it meant forwarding the spotty transformer to Plitron for a post mortem to hopefully shed light on its intermittent hum. A day after the amp returned, Xuanqian dispatched the press release about their new €3.299 Vega, an ambitious product they'd started developing 18 months prior. The Vega is a fully balanced digital audio processor with remote-controlled volume. Built around the same multi-core ARM 9 based Swiss Archwave Sanctuary chip first featured in their Ark MX+ DAC, it upsamples all PCM input signal to 1.5MHz at 32-bit depth.


This "creates a new Nyquist frequency which allowed us to design a brand-new analog circuit with higher bandwidth and faster slew rate." A femto master clock offers 0.082 pico-second clock jitter. Orfeo Class A modules once again govern the analog output stage. Data support includes DXD at 352.8/384kHz as well as native DSD at 2.8224/5.6448MHz in the established DoP V1.1 transfer protocol over USB. D/A conversion and non-lossy digital volume control are via Sabre's ESS 9018. Input socketry includes 1 x AES/EBU, 2 x coax, 1 x optical and 1 x USB with the firm's next-generation ActiveUSB™ "which separates the USB PHY into a discrete chip to reduce EMI from the computer". Specs include S/N ratio of 126dB A-weighted, THD+N of <0.0003%, dynamic range of 130dB, output impedance of 2.2/50Ω on XLR/RCA, max 4.2V output and a 512 x 64 pixel OLED display.


Due to the Merak's very low noise floor and 'analogue' voicing, DAC-direct balanced drive should really guarantee similar S/N and dynamic range values to prevent resolution strangulation in the chain. That would make Vega the perhaps ideal companion. For this review however I'd still 'make do' with the Taurus preamplifier and wrap the assignment in a timely manner.