CCY Engineering F7 Power Amp Part 1.5 - An "Unofficial" First Listen

When Chong, the head honcho of CCY Engineering, told me about his "preorder price" for the F7 power amp, an idea flashed through my mind. I couldn't resist the urge to test the idea out. So here we have this write-up, which I call "Part 1.5", as it is a detour from my usual practice of testing out equipment in my dedicated room, with the system set up in a more conventional "audiophile-approved" way.  

The F7's is going for RM 1,688 now (refer to part 1 here for technical spec of the amp). To get a class A amp at this price point must rank as a bargain. My idea was that as a lot of people are spending a lot of  time working from home at this time of pandemic, me included, wouldn't it be cool if I could set up a cost-effective but good sounding system in my home office, capable of providing a high level of musical satisfaction while operating in a normal work space (i.e., not specifically set up/treated for HiFi). For me, my work-from-home arrangement is done from a spare bedroom in my home.

For this experiment, I paired the F7 with equipment and cables I already had. For source duty, I went back to my old but still fine-sounding Marantz DV-7001 universal player (I play CDs, still am not firmly in the streaming crowd yet). 

For pre-amp, I pressed into duty the Chinese passive preamp that I bought awhile ago, which I wanted to use with my Pass Labs Aleph 3 (while hoping I could find a used unit of the Aleph 3's matching preamp the Aleph L). This passive no-name preamp is minimalist in that it operates only on an Alps potentiometer and comes with only 1 input and 1 output.

The speakers were the Mission M30i which my kid no longer used. The Missions were 'cute' speakers (i.e., small), so I didn't expect them to give me room-filling sound, but I didn't need that too in my circumstance. 

I put the system on a Ikea table opposite my workstation. Again no fancy and not even basic HiFi furniture. Give the elongated shape of the F7, I didn't have enough real estate on the table top to fit in the Marantz player, so I placed it underneath the table (again, this would not have been an audiophile approved thingy to do).

All the partnering equipment added up costing less than the F7 itself, except the Marantz player when new, but I think a DVD player would have lost a significant chunk of its value by now too. 

So, from an audiophile point of view, the F7 had many things stacked against it. 

Anyway, I wanted to see whether I could enjoy some music while I work, with a system costing about, I would say, RM3k - RM4k.

The initial listening revealed a problem with this arrangement. The sound was congested and blurred in the upper bass and lower mid regions. I thought t could be caused by the driver configuration on the Mission speakers, which is inverted (bass/mid driver on top, the tweeter below), putting the tweeter way below my ear height, the height differential was further exacerbated by my close range listening position which was just about 1.5m away. I decided to improvise by tilting the front baffle of the speakers up a little, and found a satisfying solution with the speakers' front lifted about 1 cm from the table top by slotting a CD case underneath it (again, this would not be audiophile-approved way). Anyway, the tilt largely resolved the congestion issue, what remained I thought could be addressed by increasing the spread distance between the 2 speakers, to do that I'd need to put them on proper speaker stands, but I got lazy 😁. 

The CCY F7 ran hot, its I-beam chassis was very warm to the touch once it was fully warmed up and stabilized (a 1 hour period should be good enough, just like my other class A Pass Labs amps), though I think it did not get as hot as my Aleph 3 amp.

After a few days' listening, I got a handle of this system's capability. Limited by the small Missions, it could not handle loudness and scale to my satisfaction, it played best with simpler music. However, that does not mean that it could work only with slow and languid music, on the contrary, the sound was lively and dynamic contrast was very good, it was definitely not a snooze-inducing listen. What really surprised me was a good measure of the sound characteristics in the mid and high regions that made me fell in love with my first Pass Labs amp, the Aleph 3 (Class A 30 watts).  

I never heard music coming out of the Mission 30i like this, especially in the mid and high. I heard a satisfying level of transparency and separation in the sound (other than the little residual congestion in the bass region I attributed to the speakers), the high was clean and quite smooth and devoid of harshness and undue sharpness. I credited the CCY F7 for all this.    

Below is a iPhone SE recording of this system playing a track from this Itzhak Perlman  / Pinchass Zukerman album, track 7 Jean-Marie Leclair Sonata Op 3 No 4 first movement - Allegro assai.

This is a track with 2 violins. From the clip, you could hear that the music presentation was lively and had a good amount of nuances, the violin tone was quite naturally portrayed, and the interplay between the 2 violins made the track an interesting listen (if you hear some humming noise from the beginning of the clip, that is the hum from my air-cond compressor from outside the room window).

Next up is an excerpt of Joni Mitchell's "Urge for Going", she sung with just a guitar accompaniment. There was a trace of natural warmth in this replay that was reminiscent of my past experience with other class A amps that I found quite appealing.

I like the CCY F7 a lot from this 'unofficial' first listen. Its sound is pristine and smooth, and the music presentation is alive. I shall put it through a more challenging pace in my listening room next, with much more capable speakers.

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