Myryad Support

The design of a good-sounding amplifier, or any hi-fi product, requires careful attention to many details. If just one key feature is overlooked it could turn a great product into a mediocre one. The designer must always design the product as a whole and not focus too much any one ‘favourite’ area.

Careful and precise engineering can take you 90% of the way to a top design and without it the design will fail. But it is the final 10% which distinguishes the best hi-fi marques. Experience and a deep understanding of the critical aspects of an amplifier’s performance lead to the best circuit topologies and physical layout. Again, looking at the product as a whole is important. An amplifier and its power supply are one – and must be designed as such.

The final subtleties of tonal balance musicality and soundstaging, which distinguish even the best amplifiers, can be influenced by component type and quality. Although the primary specification of all components must be to meet engineering requirements, that still leaves a great deal of choice available to the designer. For instance, Myryad’s use of precision metal film resistors and polypropylene film capacitors – even in its budget products in key locations – is based on many hours of listening. The use of parts such as these make a significant contribution to the open and transparent yet warm and musical sound exhibited by all Myryad’s products.

This design philosophy is applied equally to all Myryad’s products, from the least to the most expensive. In a budget amplifier the cost constraints are more onerous and the quality of the sound must be compatible with lower cost sources and loudspeakers. At the high-end an amplifier must perform impeccably with the most detailed sources and the most transparent (and often taxing) loudspeakers while still meeting the approval of the critical ears of the high-end listener. In either case the same design philosophy guides all Myryad products to ensure they sound and look beautiful.

Of course, the ultimate design goal is that there should not actually be a ‘sound’ that is particular to Myryad. A perfect hi-fi product would be totally neutral and not impose any characteristic of its own on the music, but different hi-fi has different characteristics just as different musical instruments do.

There is an infinite variety of possible sonic characteristics which a product can take on as it deviates from absolute neutrality. These are often described by various subjective and comparative terms such as ‘hard’/’soft’, ‘bright’/’dark’, ‘warm’/’cold’ and so on. Myryad believes that when designing hi-fi products it is important to avoid focusing too heavily on any one particular aspect of the sound as this can often lead to improvements in one area at the expense of degradation elsewhere. At Myryad we always consider the sound as a whole and aim to optimize the sonic performance across its total spectrum.

Myryad products are designed keeping the ultimate aim of neutrality always in mind. To this end we treat aspects such as transparency and precision as key parameters. However, there are many products on the market which score very highly on transparency and precision but have a cold, lifeless and un-involving sound.

At Myryad we take great care to ensure that transparency and precision are achieved without compromising musicality and a degree of warmth. The sound is dynamic with excellent transient precision and power – but not artificially emphasized. Treble accuracy and detail are achieved while keeping the top end sweet and smooth – without any hardness.

Proof of the success of this approach is that no fewer than 8 out 10 of Myryad’s M-Series products hold the coveted 5-Star rating in leading British magazine, ‘What Hi-Fi?’ – an unprecedented proportion of an entire product series, and the strongest possible endorsement of Myryad’s skill in designing consistently superb and natural-sounding products.

* Larger (and, particularly, Far-Eastern) manufacturers cater for mass tastes.
* British manufacturers, such as Myryad, have traditionally designed for the smaller (but steadily growing) market for the more discerning music-lover.
* Larger international manufacturers tend to offer products with many features – frequently just for marketing purposes, with many features bringing few true sonic benefits to the end-user.
* Because all such features introduce additional circuitry which can only degrade the ultimate performance, Myryad products are designed with only those features and controls that are totally necessary. As the result, circuitry is purer, operation is simpler, and a greater part of product cost can be allocated to high-quality components which genuinely benefit performance.
* Mass-produced products are designed to be immediately impressive in demonstration at the point of purchase – usually through emphasis on one aspect of performance.
* Myryad takes care with all products to ensure that their performance reflects the Myryad criteria (set out above) for how they should sound – which, of course, makes them much more satisfying to live with over the longer-term.

Against an industry background where top performance was frequently possible only at the expense of indifferent appearance, poor reliability and high cost, Myryad’s declared philosophy was to create and market a complementary range of high quality audio and a/v separates which offered:

‘outstanding performance, graceful aesthetics, first-class reliability and exceptional value for money’ – all backed by exemplary service levels.

Reviewing the MDP500 in Stereophile Guide to Home Theater in November, 2000 – from which it went on to receive the Gold Award in Stereophile Guide to Home Theater’s 2001 Awards in the US – the internationally respected reviewer Robert Deutsch himself repeated the Myryad philosophy, writing:

‘Myryad’s stated objective is to create and market products that provide ‘outstanding performance, graceful aesthetics, first-class reliability, and exceptional value for money’. With the MDP500, I’d say they’ve met that goal.’

At Myryad, we are constantly striving to achieve even better performance from even more attractive products, offering even better reliability and even better value for money. Constantly growing levels of international sales suggest that consumers all around the world agree with this philosophy!

Conventional ‘unbalanced’ signal cables have a single wire for the audio signal surrounded by a cylindrical ‘shield’ conductor which makes the ground return connection. In a balanced cable there are two wires within the shield one for the signal and one for the ground return. The shield is only used to protect against interference sources. Properly designed balanced interconnections are less affected by radio interference and problems of grounding compatibility between audio components.

Balanced interconnections are always used in professional systems where long cable runs are common and a wide variety of audio components, which may not be compatible, are likely to be used.

In a well-designed home audio set-up there should be no grounding incompatibility and most interconnects should be short so radio interference should not be a problem. The only exception can be in the interconnection between the preamplifier and the power amplifier, where long cable runs might be used if the power amplifiers are placed close to the speakers (with very short speaker cables)