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Packaged in a rectangular extrusion, with four mounting hex screws hidden from view beneath the rubber bumpers masquerading as footers, the innards show the promised 10-cap array, a small power toroid, a bank of fuses and two small boards populated by tiniferous SMDs. As though to match, the blue power indicator is the merest of pin-prick thru-holes rather than full mini LED. Très chic, no retina burn anywhere. It's all seriously understated.

For all its petite profile (a mere 5mm wider than my business card and no taller), enclosure depth is quite conventional. Stood on their side, you could easily get seven of these monos in any space usually taken up by a CD player or preamp.

As our favorite Belgian Hercule Poirot would put it, c'est ça. This is all the guts it takes to make 100 4-ohmige watts.

If you protesteth that these input buffer parts are well visible and far from tiny, check out the flip side - not a job for the generic DIY solder slinger. That's why Hypex supplies the robotically stuffed UCD100 OEM* board (above and below).

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* Hypex has designed and manufactured two different series of modules. One series is aimed at the end user and contains a lot of the nifty bits people have come to expect. The other series is aimed at the OEM user such as Hexateq. There are a lot of areas where these modules differ from the consumer modules. Input buffers (if present), feedback, output caps, wattage, mounting options, interface, DC protection/amp on implementations etc. We have used the UCD100OEM modules in our Premium 1.0 power amplifier. Now, unlike a consumer module, the UCD100 contains no input buffer circuitry. In essence, every manufacturer who uses this module has to develop their own flavour of input buffer and associated power supply circuitry. It thus would be unfair to speak of a stock module as every working application by definition will be non-stock.


We are using the famous LM4562 input buffer. In case of the SE version, the input buffer is is fed by two discrete power regulators which basically hot-rods the all-important input buffer power supply. We're using one for the minus rail and one for the positive rail. We are using the 'reference standard' in input caps but have chosen to add jumpers to our circuit boards which can be removed to switch the input caps back in series with the input in case there's some DC on the input. Furthermore we are using a different flavour of output cap for the SE version. Our power supply might look small but due to the efficient nature of the amps, you don't need to over-spec by large amounts. There's still 10.000uF sitting in those tiny but high-quality Panasonic caps.

How about this discrete power regulator? It's half the size of a postage stamp.

Two looks at the paralleled supply rail with its Panasonic caps.

What you don't get for the €875 bills/per is the monocoque, milled-from-a-solid-block construction Hexateq reserves for its Reference Series [super-imposed sample below, with CNC'd billet on table]. The 3rd left insert shows the 7 x mono-channel solution. Some Hexateq-built powerline products and BD Design's Crazy V preamp inside a Hexateq enclosure make up the remainder of the collage.

The only minor functional complaint I could see anyone leveling at Hexateq's Hypex implementation is that once a power cord is inserted, most power plugs will nearly obscure the mains rocker to make the latter nearly inaccessible for anyone with thick fingers. Leaving these 92% efficient operators powered up indefinitely is of course only a shade paler than green.

For added perspective on general size, I parked a normally dimensioned FirstWatt F5 adjacent to the Belgian strip amps.

Here's the same setup from the back rather than top. Small and tidy is the new big and heavy.