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Aroma. To understand why during my first encounter I'd called the CFA-1 a very rare cross of transistor and tube virtues (I'd then owned Yamamoto and Woo Audio valve amps for direct contrast), let's revisit Roland's harmonic distortion distribution. It's 0.1% 2nd order, 0.05% 3rd and 0.04% 4th. On magnitude and by remaining constant over power it's far lower than zero NFB triode amps. Yet by having its 2nd harmonic dominate the 3rd by a factor of 20, the general flavor is triode-like. Of course valve amps can't even dream of output impedance of <0.06Ω whilst the Kaluga Mola-Mola monos dream even smaller. As kings of low they manage an astonishing <0.002Ω across their bandwidth. The CFA-2 circuit is set to drop its Z-out below that of the CFA-1.2 and even make it variable. It also lowers THD. If the harmonic mix remains constant and just magnitude diminishes, one would expect a similar but even milder aroma. As valve lovers know full well—as do SETransistor fans in my FirstWatt club—it's so often not the lowest figure which wins. In this game zero counting is for dweebs. Only getting out of the lab into the listening room has these particular answers.

Crayon Audio CFA-1 in our Chardonne residence four years earlier


Before we do, the obligatory look beneath the cover first. This again secures solely with four long vertical bolts upon which the decorative but large-diameter aluminium discs clamp down with excellent contact pressure. Undo those discs and even the side walls fall out since merely two short pins on each edge keep them put whilst a channel across their ends holds the rear panel captive. It's a very clever lego solution to avoid visible fasteners and generate that quasi monolithic hewn-from-solid look which here is such a strong industrial design cue.

Here are two of the Fairchild Semiconductor enhancement-mode power field effect transistors in FQP 65N06/27P06 n/p-channel flavors. They obviously mount to the massive chimney-bore heatsink which divides the chassis into motherboard and SMPS halves. As the top-down view already showed, the multi-layer board is an exercise in dense SMD population.

These speaker terminal flying leads off the board carry significant current.


Here is another detail view on the mother board.



Incoming AC first encounters this 'dry cleaning' parlor before it hits the self-regulated switch-mode supply whose vents incidentally don't disguise a fan though the perf pattern looks as though it did.