CCY Engineering SS300B - Malaysia's Own Class A Power Amp

Posted by Tan.

Many regard Class A as the finest-sounding amplifier topology, and I wouldn’t argue with that. Sure, Class A has its disadvantages – heat generation, bulk, and cost, to name a few. But hey, as a dedicated audiophile, I like to live a little dangerously. Ever since my first encounter with Pass Labs’ Aleph 3, that charming little porcupine (nicknamed for its chassis covered with protruding fins) of an amp and smitten by its beguiling sound, all my subsequent amplifiers have been full Class A designs from Pass Labs. I’d characterize Class A sound as transparent, natural, and comes with a touch of richness and warmth. The Class A amplifiers are also exceptionally quick and dynamic, even more so than many Class A/B designs with higher power output ratings that I've encountered over the years.

Class A designs are increasingly rare nowadays. Their relatively higher cost, low power rating, and high electricity consumption make them less appealing compared to Class A/B and Class D amplifiers. However, there is a Malaysian company and amplifier designer who is bravely forging ahead on the Class A path - CCY Engineering. I wrote about their earlier Class A amplifier, the CCY F7, which you can read about here and here. Now, CCY Engineering has released a new full Class A power amplifier, and I took it in for a listen.

The new amplifier is called the SS300B. Is CCY hinting at a sound reminiscent of the famous 300B tube? I didn’t ask. But with the SS300B’s 25W output, it’s more powerful than the typical 8W of a 300B tube amp, which would make it more versatile in loudspeaker matching.

I paired the SS300B with my TAD TSM-2201 bookshelf studio monitor (rated at 86dB/W/m), its revealing nature would expose any flaws upstream. The front ends, consisting of the TAD-D600 disc player and Pass Labs XP20 preamp, was admittedly an overkill, but I hope this setup would make the SS300B show how far its performance envelope could be pushed. So, I put the SS300B through quite a challenging pace in fact.

The SS300B rose to the occasion admirably. It possessed all the qualities one would expect from a Class A design. It sounded transparent but not in the lean and thin way that many modern amplifiers veer towards, the sound had good body especially in the midrange, and details were not obscured. It was articulate, musical nuances were portrayed beautifully. The musicality typical of a Class A amplifier was evident.

Vocals were definitely its strength. On track 8 of the 2v1G CD “不愿一个人 Don’t Want to Be Alone,” the emotion in the vocal was excellently resolved, one could hear the longing and despair expressed in the singing. The accompanying guitar was crisp with adequate attack in each pluck.

Switching to “Belafonte Sings the Blues” album, track 7 “Cotton Fields,” the sense of pace was even more pronounced. The bouncy bass notes were clear and free of muddiness, with the music swinging along with toe-tapping rhythm. Belafonte’s diction was clear, making it easy to follow the lyrics word by word. His voice’s tonal color added to the listening enjoyment. The rendition became more frantic during the second half of the song, and the SS300B did an excellent job bringing us through the dynamic changes.

For classical music, I played “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, my favorite version being Norman Del Mar’s with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on DG. Although this CD doesn’t have the best recording quality from an audiophile perspective, I love the emotive music, the conducting and orchestra. The SS300B maintained the inner tension of the music well, from the hushed opening, through the buildup in the middle, then on to the let-it-rip crescendo at the end. It allowed me to focus on the moving musical message despite the recording's sonic imperfections, thus confirming the SS300B's music making ability.

If you would like to get a taste of what Class A amplification can do but found Class A choices hard to come by or the cost prohibitive, I suggest you give the SS300B a listen. You may be charmed by its tonal richness, detail resolution and the humanness in its music delivery. While pairing it with a revealing studio monitor like my TAD TSM-2201s might not be the best choice for less than perfect recordings unless you are the type who like a warts-and-all presentation, I think offerings from early day Sonus Faber and British marques like Harbeth or Spendor would be fabulous matches for long term listening pleasure. Please contact CCY Engineering to arrange an audition – website: https://www.ccyengineering.com/home; Email: chong@ccyengineering.com.

CCY Engineering F7 Power Amp Part 2 - The Listening Sessions

For these listening sessions, I moved the CCY Engineering F7 power amp (more details of the amp can be found here) into my main listening room. Initially, the set up for source and pre-amp was the same as the one I used in my last post, i.e., the Marantz DV7001 universal player as source and a no-name passive pre-amp for volume control. The one big change, in addition to the listening space change, was the loudspeakers - I switched to the TAD TSM-2201 monitor loudspeakers, rather than sticking with the dinky Missions.

The setup went through the normal adjustment process, with experimentation in loudspeaker positioning and cable swapping. A few days later, I thought I have wrung most of the performance that I could get from this system, but the end result was unsatisfactory to me. The positive side to the sound that I noted in my past post was there, i.e., the qualities of purity and smoothness, but I felt that the music replay was a little flat and loose, lacking somewhat the verve essential for music to sound interesting and, um, musical. Time and again I found my attention drifted mid-track when listening. If the CCY F7 could talk, I think it would say "come on man, please give me something more, something that I could work with". I thought something upstream was throttling the CCY F7. 

On a hunch I decided to ditch the passive pre-amp and pressed my Musical Fidelity A1 integrated amp (2008 version) into service. The MF A1 has a pre-amp output and that was what I was looking for. This change turned out to be the one that finally made the entire system clicked.

The Musical Fidelity A1 (ver.2008) sitting on top of the Marantz DV7001 player. It is not an audiophile best practice to stack equipment on top of each other of course, but I ran out of wooden board, and I found that putting the MF A1 directly on the floor made the sound worse, so compromise, compromise.

Now, the sound through the CCY F7 amp bloomed, the soundstage opened up, and the music took on greater extensions. The sound coming out of the CCY F7 was tonally rich and dense, it was an oil painting now vs water colour from before the pre-amp swap. 

This shows that the CCY F7 has a good level of transparency, being able to reflect changes made upstream. It deserves good quality partners for it to give its best. Don't be fooled by the CCY F7's price, it punches above its price class. 

The CCY F7, with its class A pedigree, did not sound analytical like some solid state amps could, and it was also did not sound warm and fuzzy like some olden day tube amps. Its sound was rather "meaty" and not threadbare, so its music presentation was more natural than hifi-ish.

The CCY F7 had a lively presentation, with excellent dynamic expression and transient attack. Of course this was also subject to the CCY F7's power rating (20w into 8ohms, and 30w into 4ohm) and the sensitivity of the loudspeakers it was used with. With the TAD TSM2201 loudspeakers in my listening room, I could sense a little bit of stress occasionally with big orchestral crescendos, nothing that could not be solved by backing down on the volume control a notch or two, nothing catastrophic happened.  

Soundstaging was pretty good. This was of course also subject to the room and the loudspeakers' capability too. Through the CCY F7, the TAD TSM-2201 conjured up a soundstage size close to what I heard when they were driven by my reference system, despite the huge gulf in price between the two systems (the no-name passive pre-amp shrunk the soundstage quite significantly though, again showing how important it was to pair the CCY F7 with good partners). Imaging has good specificity and focus, with good delineation and space in-between images. 

The star in CCY F7's sound, especially when the price was taken into account, was definitely its purity in the mid and high frequency ranges, which also have an appealing thin layer of warmth added throughout. Further down at the bass region, bass notes were well delineated and quite agile, as opposed to being ponderous. 

Overall, the CCY F7 served music very well in my system. Let me share a few video recordings of this system made with my iPhone SE with you:

For a start, a solo piano piece. Piano has wide frequency range and dynamic range. It has transient attack aplenty being a percussive instrument. Its sound is harmonically rich. So a piano album can be a challenge to systems that are a one-trick-pony, i.e., one that excels in one particular department only. The track used was from George Winston's album "Autumn", track 2 "Woods". With the CCY F7 in the chain, George Winston's piano sounded one piece and came with the requisite tonality, speed, and attack that I was looking for:

  

Looking to have the CCY F7 play something more bombastic? How about Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade? This next recording is a 6-minute excerpt of Scheherazade 4th movement from Fritz Reiner's version on Living Stereo. That this 20-watter could take on this challenge without turning the sound into a complete mush was impressive. Though I could wish for better control at occasional spots in the music, it was nitpicking at this price point. The presentation was exciting and articulated, which were the most important factors for me for the listening enjoyment of this music:

Lastly, the obligatory female vocal test. This is from 2V1G's debut album, track 8 "Don't want to be alone 不愿一个人", the overall musicality in the vocal and guitar was very well expressed:

The CCY F7 power amp truly impressed. At an introductory price of RM1,688, the performance-to-cost ratio is very high. Check it out if you are stepping up from an integrated amp, or are planning to put together a system with budget of say, up to RM20k-RM30k. Suitably matched the CCY F7 power amp will save you a ton of budget in the amplifier department. Highly recommended. 

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Postscript:

I asked Mr. Chong CY, the founder of CCY Engineering about his background and the genesis of the F7, this is what he told me:

"I am a full-time electronic engineer dealing with high power half bridge designs, the applications included LLC switching power supplies and transformerless 100V PA industries Class D power amplifiers. I like dealing with circuits related to audio and have been lurking in the DIYAUDIO forum since my studying time till now.

The whole idea started in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when everyone was forced to stay at home and do nothing. I told myself why not make something crazy and put it on the market? What if I made the cheapest class A amplifier in the world that everyone would buy without any hesitation? With a price tag of RM888 for a 25w dual mono class A push pull power amp, which was cheaper and better than anything on Aliexpress, that was how my first power amp (the A2540) was born. But the sad thing was that the sales response was not going to the way I was expecting at all.

On the bright side, I met quite a lot of really nice people throughout this journey, Wilson Teoh from My Hifi News, Matthew Ong from AFC Top Hi-Fi, Mr. Hassan from RayaMusicWorld, YF Fong from AudioTech Service Network, and many others.

I was reading on the F7 topology one day - applying positive feedback right after the speaker impedance load and distorting the input signal intentionally? It sounded very unique! I dug out my old F5 (with a chassis very alike the F7) that I built during 2010, put two resistors on it, one 0.33R in series to the ground and one 33.9k back to the input. And wow! That’s a very different sound compared to the original F5! From there, I quickly work on my first F7 prototype and asked my friends to drop by for a listen. The sound was so warm and tubey that they requested me to make a few more for them. That’s where the first F7 Clone pre-order started."

CCY Engineering contact - https://web.facebook.com/CcyEngineering-109995560498110

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.

CCY Engineering's facebook page https://web.facebook.com/CcyEngineering-109995560498110

CCY Engineering F7 Power Amp Part 1 - An Introduction

Here we have another hifi product designed and made in Malaysia, this time it is a power amplifier. 

What excites me about this amplifier is its design. Its topology, as I understand from Mr. Chong the head honcho of CCY Engineering, borrows heavily from Nelson Pass' design in his First Watt F7 model. I am a big Pass Labs fan since its Aleph days (I still have an Aleph 3 power amp in my collection) and am a very happy user of a pair of XA160.5 monoblocks. However, we don't come across First Watt much, if at all, in Malaysia, as it doesn't have a local distributor/dealer, but I have long desired to listen to a First Watt amplifier. 

So, when I heard that CCY was making a power amplifier based on a First Watt design, my interest was piqued. A friend bought one of the early CCY F7 units coming out of CCY Engineering. He allowed me to hijack it for a while to do this series of write-up/reviews (Lim, thanks!). The unit was duly delivered to my place by Mr. Chong himself a few days ago. In this first write-up I would like to touch on its design and I'll cover its sound performance in the next few articles. 

As far as I could ascertain, the CCY F7 amplifier is the second amplifier coming out of CCY Engineering. This second amp continues with the creative, unique, idiosyncratic and almost whimsical chassis design of the first amplifier (the CCY A2450), with the colour of faceplate changed from red on the previous model to black. 

From the photo you can see that the amplifier, uniquely, uses an I-beam as its main body, giving it an elongated, slightly-longer-than-a-shoe-box shape. The circuit board is attached to the underside of the central plate of the I-beam, with the metal plate itself acting pretty much as a heat sink, which is an important necessity as the CCY F7 is a Class A amp.  

The back of the amp is pretty straightforward, it has a IEC power inlet, a pair of RCA input, and a pair of loudspeaker output which, not very conveniently for me, takes only banana plugs as I'd prefer spade which offers a tighter and more secured contact for amp and loudspeaker, I feel.

You would also notice that the amp does not come with a power on/off switch. This is not much of an issue if you can switch the amp on or off at the wall. But if you can't, e.g., if the amp is plugged into a power conditioner that is shared with other equipment, CCY includes with the F7 an umbilical cord with a massive power switch, which your powercord can then plug into. 

First Watt amplifiers are pretty much niche products, they produce low output power (less than 25 watts into 8 ohms), but have relatively high power consumption and run hot, as they are Class A amplifiers. The CCY F7 is no exception to this Class A mould. While First Watt has not published the F7 schematics officially, as it is still one of the current models in its lineup, Chong has based his F7 version on information and high resolution photos and images of the First Watt F7 on the internet.

Chong told me the following about the CCY F7 amp, I quote:

"Topology highlights -

1. This is a push-pull class A amp, running on negative feedback, the uniqueness is that it also applies some amount of positive current feedback from the output captured right AFTER the speaker load back to the input.

As speaker impedance changes across the music bandwidth, the lower the impedance goes, the higher the positive feedback sent back and superimposed with the input, here’s the magic of the F7.

 Build highlights:

1. Dual Mono setup, left and right channels are electrically isolated.

2. All-in-one PCB Layout, no flying wires on any connector other than the transformer.

3. Input stage with NOS Toshiba JFETs 2SJ74/2SK170

4. Output stage with Exicon Lateral Mosfets ECX10N20/ECX10P20

5. O-shape Toroid Transformer

6. DC offset Relay speaker Protection.

7. A total of 144,000uF(72,000uF/channel) capacitance with CRC configuration at Power supply.

 Specifications:

1. 20W @ 8ohm / 30w @ 4ohm

2. Gain 14dB

3. Input Impedance @ ~25k ohm

4. Output Impedance @ ~0.4 ohm"

The underbelly of the CCY F7 is protected with a wire mesh, the circuit is visible through it. Better photos of the innards can be seen on CCY Engineering's facebook page https://web.facebook.com/CcyEngineering-109995560498110. Here is a photo I found on the FB page, with the big O-shape toroidal transformer seen to the front of the amp:

My immediate task now is to run it for a short while, as it is new out of the box, then do some serious listening. I'll do my listening sessions with some speakers that are commensurate with the CCY F7's price point and will also throw something more challenging at it to see how it will fare. 

I'll share some background of CCY Engineering's founder Mr Chong, together with my listening impression of the amp in my next few write-ups. Stay tuned.