That says nothing about product quality, only that they're weak on marketing; or have plenty of word-of-mouth biz to not bother. In fact, not to advertise leaves more coin to invest into the actual hardware. Brands you've never heard of could offer the highest material value because of it. News pages in limbo are simply counterproductive. But giving John Laurel a break was easy. Having covered his Canary products with multiple reviews over the years, I knew of their excellence. So what if their marketing was iffy? I couldn't design an amp if my life depended on it. We've all got different talents. Did you know that historically, the word 'talent' referred to a scale and a unit of weight? An ancient Greek talent then was about 26kg. Later it became a currency worth 6'000 drachma.

In this age of growing energy awareness, the inefficiency of class A power conversion seems predestined for outlaw status. Just so, by mid 2015, disproportionately high power draw of about 10 times its rated power even at idle hadn't yet brought down the legislative axe. Being always on, class A devices don't switch. They bypass zero-crossing issues but enforce 10% or lower efficiency. The SET abbreviation for single-ended triode spells out why such circuits must be class A by design. A single output device per channel couldn't possibly switch on and off. With tubes, such SE circuits are popular. Thus the 't' in SET nearly always refers to triode, not transistor. Equally common are low power figures, often in the single-digit realm. As soon as the term transistor is uttered, buyers expect power. So transistor SET are far more rare. It's unfair but, ten watts or less are perfectly legit even for very expensive 10Y, 101D, PX25, 45, 2A3 or 300B amplifiers. Meanwhile they'd make most equivalent Mosfet, BJT or Jfet versions unsellable. If a transistor amp means to join the elite class A ranks and enjoy actual sales, it must deliver more power than its triodic kin. Enter class A push/pull and banks of paralleled devices. Voilà, our MA-260. Because its form factor is neither abnormally tall nor deep but arch conservative, it can't dissipate the heat which 100 or more 8Ω watts would generate. So it produces just shy of half that which for the vast triode majority would be extreme power. Yet for a transistor chappie it's merely middling. Them's the breaks. But it also cuts the other way. The MA-260 delivers more current and lower output Ω than most valve SET will. It becomes the better designated driver for more (less specialized) speakers with their bigger woofers of high back EMF and/or standard ported alignments with wicked phase angles and steep impedance fluctuations. That's how things balance out again. At $5'995, the MA-260 also sets its coin needle spot on versus the $6'500 Pass Labs XA30.8 which milks 30/60wpc into 8/4Ω from 10 push/pull Mosfet pairs per side.