Special Design Features; Highly Refined Circuit Design; Extensive Listening Tests - Classe Audio CA-M400 Owner's Manual

Special Design Features

highly refined All Classé analog amplification stages are based on circuits that have
circuit design
been extensively optimized over many years of continuous development.
By starting with excellent circuit designs and working with them over
the years, we are able to discover the many small refinements that add
up to superlative performance, in a variety of applications. Altering a
voltage here, or using a slightly different part there, may make all the
difference between solid and absolutely outstanding performance.
This level of refinement only comes with a great deal of experience, and
is not available to those who flit from one trendy notion to the next. It
accounts in no small measure for both the consistency of sonic perfor-
mance among Classé products (as they are all based on similar analog
gain stages), and for the consistently excellent reviews those products re-
ceive by owners and reviewers alike.

extensive listening tests

Excellent measured performance is to be expected in world-class prod-
ucts, and Classé products deliver that performance. However, experience
has shown that technical excellence alone is insufficient to guarantee
subjectively musical results.
For this reason, all Classé products are laboriously fine-tuned during the
development process by carefully controlled listening tests. Our ears are
still some of the finest laboratory test instruments available, and nicely
complement more traditional engineering test equipment. In the
course of optimizing the circuitry for a product, hundreds of decisions
are made based on the subjective impression given by substituting one
high quality part for another.
As an example, we may listen to half a dozen 0.1% film resistors of the
same value, from several different companies. Standard tests may show
them all to provide identical results in terms of noise, distortion, and so
forth. Yet, almost invariably, one selection yields some small improve-
ment in the subjective reaction to the performance of the product un-
der development. Less often, even a single such change can result in a
surprisingly large improvement.
Multiply those various improvements by the dozens or even hundreds
of such decisions that must be made before the product can be finalized
for production, and you have a remarkable improvement, indeed—all
based on careful listening tests, which we view as a necessary comple-
ment to the solid engineering you might rightly expect from Classé.
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