ASPEN AMPLIFIERS
PRODUCTS 2022
Aspen Amplifiers was founded in mid-nineties in Melbourne, Australia, by a retired Army Officer who had been trained as a science teacher and an IT consultant. The company spent its first five years in R&D, and in 2000 became commercially with its first product, the AKSA 55. This product was an amplifier kitset – hence AKSA - and sold the kits through Printed Electronics, a small company manufacturing printed circuits in Melbourne. After a good review at TNT, a well known website at the time in Europe, Aspen began to sell 55W power amp kits.
In 2001 the 100W AKSA was released, and in 2002 the GK-2, a tube/solid-state preamplifier designed to match with the first two power amplifiers. These new products were sold in a packaged kit; all components, pcbs, all wire, heatsinks and hardware included. They were sold all over the world, particularly to the US but also to Scandinavia, central Europe, India, Canada and South America. At the first, the kits were quite inexpensive, but it become obvious to most builders that the sound quality of these products was top notch, ranking with some of the expensive, store bought products in hifi shops around the world. In addition, I found that the email support was far in excess of expectation, and I spent my life at the PC and eventually in 2007 Aspen decided to offer only fully built/tested modules to remove the email support workload. Of course, the sales dropped, but the profits increased as the reputation for Aspen products had been established.
Since the early days of Aspen, the company has produced a wide range of new product. Lifeforce (55W and 100W), Soraya (105W), NAKSA (70W and then 80W), and replacing all these generation amplifiers, the latest products: SAKSA (85W, entry level), the Titan (125W, monoblock mid-level) and the Maya (200W, premium dual monoblock). With passing years, new products have grown in
The Aspen line has developed further and rationalised to just three products. The reflects my continuous improvement over the decades, and I must say that after 25 years of design I'm starting to really get the hang of it..... I've done my 10,000 hours!
ENTRY LEVEL is SAKSA 85. The SAKSA is a Class AB power amplifier with an overbuilt mosfet output stage, running 42V rails and producing 85W into 8R, and around 150W into 4R. The amp is sold either as a module (single pcb including all power supplies except transformer, but including left and right channels all installed on a MF30-75 Conrad heatsink, for buyer installation. A fully built plug 'n play SAKSA is always available on request.
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PREMIUM LEVEL is the MAYA. This Class AB is my best with two very large mosfets in the output stage, very powerful, and 210W//8R and 325W/4R. This is just over five and a half plus GST and it's been on sale around the world since 2017. I also sell the modules for two thousand six hundred plus GST. I have them in France, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, India, Singapore, US, UK and Canada and even a few in Oz.
All my amps feature spatial presentation, that is, a wide, deep image similar to a good tube amp. The two more expensive versions are SS relay speaker protected, and each channel is independently installed on its own 280 x 71 pcb. The SAKSA installs both channels on two separate power supplies on just one 270x71mm pcb. The larger amps use integrated one channel with dual, independent power supplies on one pcb; you simply add two 300VA transformers and you have an amp. This makes them easy to build into a conventional case, such as the Italian DIY cases. The modules are built and tested, with warranty, it is difficult to stuff it up in fact. Back in the AKSA days, I would make a small profit and then throw it all away with ten or twenty emails because too many people could not read the instructions and most unskilled people think they can do anything!! Good luck to them, but it was a lousy business model......