The new Ultra-LD Stereo Amplifier incorporates a pre-amplifier stage, LED bargraph power meters, fan-forced cooling, gold-plated heavy-duty speaker terminals and a host of internal engineering features that make it easy to build. The external finish and presentation is to a professional standard. This is an amplifier that you will be proud to say, "I built this one myself!"

If you could buy the equivalent of this amplifier from one of the big name brands you would have to pay lots more dollars and even then you wouldn’t get the extremely low distortion and noise, very high damping factor and so on.

Oh, and just a word about overall performance – these days there are lots of Dolby surround sound amplifiers and surround systems which are available at relatively low prices and some have quite high power outputs, up to 100W per channel from five channels. Are these comparable to the Ultra-LD?

Let’s just put it nicely. For home theatre they are great value but most are not hifi. The Ultra-LD is a purist’s hifi amplifier. It’s an amplifier for audiophiles; it has no tone controls, no loudness control, no balance control and no switching for multiple speaker systems, all of which can add to distortion and noise.

By the way, we’re not alone in adopting this purist concept. Take a look at some of the really expensive "audiophile" amplifiers. Many don’t include tone controls or balance controls, or any other unnecessary features. Instead, the aim is to offer the best possible performance for your dollar and that’s what we’ve done with this unit.

It also makes the amplifier delightfully easy to operate – you just switch it on, select the signal source and adjust the volume control to your liking.