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For a quick flyby, here's a Google Earth view on the Gato facility 9 km northwest of Copenhagen's city center.


If you touched down on just the right day, you'd have seen these DIA chassis parts and assembled chassis waiting for guts...


... followed by PCB manufacture of DIA boards ...


... and speaker assembly of 100 model PM-6 for a brief overview on Gatos' core competencies. If you've not yet trekked over to their website, the combined background of Gato's four key players includes prior stints at Danish hifi import house Rossing Electronic and audio makers Avance loudspeakers, Holfi, Thule Audio and GamuT. That's very solid immersion in the design, manufacturing and distribution sectors of the industry to explain how Gato Audio could launch at such an elevated thoroughly experienced level.


With electronics, enclosures followed by power transformers tend to be the costliest items on the bill of materials. By repurposing their elegant case with its contoured heatsinks from the flagship models, economy of scale for the lower-priced DIA models kicks in even though their efficient class D operation doesn't actually use those curvy side extrusions directly, i.e. nothing mounts to them. Likewise for the onboard digital-to-analog converter. It trickled down from what's inside the CDD-1. Let's take a close look then at what it all adds up to inside that clean modern Nordic packaging


It arrives securely double-boxed and ensconced in full-contact foam liners with a general power cord, the metallic black wand, USB driver disc, owner's manual, company prospect and full-line glossy brochure.


After undoing just two hex screws on a small retainer lip, the entire cover slides out smartly like a dovetailed affair. Anyone wishing to swap finishes can do so in two minutes. The dual-mono SMPS and switching output devices mounted to a lateral heatsink which doubles as solid divider hide beneath the perforated shielding to elude closer inspection.


The visible board with its XMOS USB transceiver, Burr Brown PCM 1794 DAC and matching SRC 43921 upsampler, Xpresso clock...


... Chinese pulse transformer for the coaxial input, NEC input relays, Omron power relay, German Block Trafo-branded power transformer in its blue housing...


... Recom AC/DC converter, OP1652 op amps and assorted bits and bobs looks quite sparsely populated considering. The really dense action tucks into the other half.



"Volume control is by mechanical encoder of a TI PGA2320 chip-based resistor matrix which is quiet and very smooth. The converter's output is balanced which we later convert to single-ended. This is the same for the balanced inputs. They are true balanced and only later converted to single ended. That's how we like it for the DIA and AMP-150. For the SMPS and PWM amp modules we went to Pascal for a good International Rectifier-based* solution. Pascal is practically our neighbor. We modify their modules to achieve even higher performance. Compared to ICEpower modules which are more swamp and loudness soft, Pascal deliver a more lifelike dynamic foundation. The DIA400 is based on a modified M-PRO module as the smoothest and most coherent of our two models. The DIA250 is based on a modified S-PRO module and delivers a more open but less coherent performance so there is something for each taste. The input stage is fully active. We really don't like passive non-impedance compensated 'stages' which in our opinion don't work well. As Pascal's spec sheet shows, output impedance is 6mΩ for good damping factor."
stock Pascal M-PRO2 module
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* IR have developed a range of class D-optimized (high-speed switching) Mosfets called DirectFET.


Below again from Gato's line is a back view on DIA production showing the lateral extrusions forming the curved heatsinks without back and top panels.