Integrated Amplifiers

While Emotiva has changed the TA1's power rating to 60W/8ohm over the older TA-100's 50W/8ohm, it is careful not to suggest the Class A/B power amp or PSU is any bigger! In practice, those 'tweaked' analogue specifications for the TA1 look to have been brought into line with those we published for the TA-100 [HFN Apr '19]. Specifically, the TA-100 achieved 2x63W/8ohm and 2x95W/4ohm and the TA1 matches this at 2x63W/8ohm and 2x93W/4ohm. Under dynamic conditions the TA-100 stretched out to 87W, 153W, 234W and 116W into 8, 4, 2 and 1ohm loads, respectively, while the TA1 achieves 85W, 151W, 234W and 52W under identical conditions [see Graph 1], the latter figure now cut short by electronic protection. So there have been some changes... Gain is unaltered at +41.6dB but the TA1 is a little less noisy and the A-wtd S/N wider at 90.5dB vs. 88.9dB (re. 0dBW). Distortion is the same – the TA1 still showing higher THD on the left than right channel, the latter holding to within 0.01% from 1W-50W/1kHz and 0.0025-0.03%/1W from 20Hz-20kHz. The –3dB response limits remain at 3Hz-75kHz.

Tested via its preamp output, the AD1955-based digital stage achieves a maximum 3.98V output (at 0dBFs) supported by a wide 111.1dB A-wtd S/N ratio and an impressively low <1ohm output impedance (again, increasing to 17ohm/20Hz). Distortion reaches a maximum of 0.005-0.095% (20Hz-20kHz) at 0dBFs and a minimum of 0.0003-0.003% over the top 30dB of its range [Graph 2, below]. The standard linear phase digital filter offers a 77dB stopband rejection and response limits of –0.2dB/20kHz (CD/48kHz data), –2.0dB/45kHz and –5.9dB/90kHz (96kHz and 192kHz data). Jitter remains <200psec for all sample rates. PM