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Delivered in stout particle-board crates with generously thick foam spacer tubes for added protection, both Saran-wrapped components felt rather denser and tighter than usual. Knowing I'd peek inside as I always do, Ivo Linnenberg warned "that reassembling the enclosures could be a bigger problem than dismantling them. All fittings are very tight. This avoids any rattling of the cover plate and other parts. That happens very easily when using aluminium profiles. For a medium-thickness 3mm construction, our enclosures are acoustically as dead as possible." No exaggeration this was. The curved extruded profiles which run as full cheeks (the actual heatsinks for the amp are inside as you can see below) clamp down the top covers along their lateral edges. Then small hex bolts roughly in the middle couple the covers tautly to sub structures. With the amp that's a thick cross brace. With the CDP it is the central CD-PRO2 module. This very effectively eliminates the usual mechanical ringing for two compact but bullish constructions. Very nice!
The amp2S integrated is laid out dual-mono all the way to the twin 225VA Talema mains toroids. The capacitor banks seem quite over-dimensioned for the modest power rating. They are composed of many smaller paralleled units rather than the beefy soda-can jobs macho buyers expect in muscle amps.
Steve McCormack was one of the first designers to popularise this counter concept also for high-power amps. He even named his DNA amplifiers accordingly - distributed node architecture. It points at many small capacitors that are strategically placed as close as possible to the output devices to increase the caps' 'response' time.
Here are some of the output devices coupled to an internal aluminum rib...
... and here are the remaining two.
The shaft of the four-channel (balanced) volume control runs right through the chunky lateral brace which divides the amp2S into power supply and signal-path halves. Here you also see the two aluminum cubes affixed to the brace where the top plate is pulled down with the aforementioned central bolts.
Two high-quality voltage rectifiers can be seen to the right of the That Corp. quad transistors and Linear Sys. dual Jfets. Yellow LEDs act as constant current sources.
Aside from the input/output connections which bolt down solidly, the various 18V/6.3A transformer secondaries and two short ribbon cables, the very tidy construction omits flying leads.
Here is a closer view at one channel's 106.000uF capacitor bank.
This closeup shows how the transformer secondaries aren't soldered to the motherboard but instead bolted to studly posts.
Here is a final side view along the signal-path half of the amplifier.
This smaller Talema toroid mounts to the transverse board behind the clear-anodized fascia which here reflects the board and transformers like a mirror. The small inset shows the decal of one of the mains trafos.
