At this stage of our narrative, Nino went incommunicado for a long time and stopped answering emails. By mid January, he suddenly resurfaced. "More than a few months passed since you kindly published your preview. I'm sorry for this enormous delay in replying but my team and I have been very busy with shows and definitive upgrades to our Zen range. Important upgrades were made to all products inside and out. We have a new logo, one single new font on the front panels, new PCB, better connectors (Cardas on the Insight and Lysios models) and other updates. This important revision process ended just before Christmas so now we are finally ready for a review. Your Lysios loaner is playing in our listening room and soon will be fully broken in. I guess that by the end of January I could ship it." In answer to my request for more background information, "we think that music reproduction must be as realistic as possible and we believe in the commingling alchemy when NOS tubes* meet modern devices like IGBT. Zen range models are equipped with a separate power supply because power supplies really matter to us." By March 7th, "this week Lysios will be equipped with the new panels so you will have the final 2018 version for review. Now it is only a matter of days before shipment." On March 15th I had a DHL tracker and this: "This is the first production unit with the new graphics and PSU face plate without corner bolts." Clearly my comments on the visuals had been partly responsible for these delays. Kudos to any manufacturer who embraces constructive criticism in the intended spirit - to help improve their product even if it's just cosmetically.


Asked for more background intel, Nino added this: "We started about 10 years ago with an approach to hifi more philosophical than technical, searching for the best sound within the tradition plus a little innovation. For Lysios, we decided to use fast devices like IGBT whose high impedance makes them easier to drive and whose great current delivery improves over Mosfets. Usually solid-state amplifiers run complementary devices in n-channel and p-channel guise but IGBT are available only as n-channel versions. Hence we developed a quasi complementary circuit with just n-channel parts like great companies did in the early 70s when p-channel power devices were still unavailable. It seems strange but it's easier to find and match two nearly equal n-channel parts than two complementary versions. We tested several vendors of IGBT and for our project, those by Ixys were best. About 50 years ago, Mr. Baxandall discovered that a diode at a very precise point of a quasi-complementary circuit eliminates the local Miller effect** to obtain superior linearity at high frequencies. It seems strange again but in many amplifiers with a quasi-complementary circuit, this Baxandall diode never appears. In ours it does again. So by mixing a traditional quasi-complementary circuit with the innovative modern IGBT parts, we created our sound liberator aka Lysios."