DHL's rapid 2-day dispatch from sunny Sicily to Ireland's rural and rainy west coast was a bit of a surprise. Since my cosmetic bias had influenced the frontal changes for 2018, I was most curious how Antonino had streamlined his duo's looks. Hopefully others too would consider the changes attractive. For a quick reminder of the previous layout, here we revisit the old black option...
... against this year's revised black version. If stacked—the PSU is slightly shallower but not enough to have the main unit's single rear footer miss—now everything lines up cosmetically. That Power Supply Unit uses caps whilst zen dual mono power amplifier spells out all lower case remains the only small peculiarity. When powered up, the head unit's standby LED is red whilst turning its knob to 'on' switches over to the right white light. The dual-mono SpeakOn-terminated umbilicals are long enough to stack the amp on the top shelf and the power supply on the bottom shelf of a standard 4-tier rack if one wanted maximum separation. Plugged straight into the wall for the photo shoot, the PSU's twin toroids hummed audibly. I'd see how they would do with our usual Vibex DC filter and power conditioner in the actual system.
The units' back sides contained no surprises and the inputs of the amp were purely RCA. With Pass Labs' overachieving class A $4'900 XA25 just having vacated the review spot when this Sicilian shipment arrived, I couldn't help but notice the qualitative differences in metal work and finishing between them. Audiozen's £3'550 panels were far lighter and the horizontal not vertical edges of their heat sinks rough to the touch to explain why they arrived covered by masking tape. Their thin top covers would otherwise ring when tapped but small dampers glued to their insides noticeably dulled that effect. Still, overall execution reflected more budget Far Eastern imports of 5 years ago, not current mainland Italian standards like Aqua Hifi or Unison Research.
Hand-cut foam liners and taped bubble wrap inside Nino's compact wooden crate too pointed at a smaller younger boutique not yet competitive on those counts with the established big houses. Our DHL delivery guy even commented that two handles on the crate would have been considerate but its very manageable weight didn't make those any real requirement.
Removing the top covers secured by four screws each revealed the respective innards.
For the head unit, one sees two mirror-imaged PCB with single capacitors in the corners and a quad of Ixys IGBT mounted to each finned heat sink, with one of those devices...
...'humbucked' by an additional diode. Here's looking at one half of the dual-mono circuit...
... which we finish up with a closeup at three of its output transistors.
