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Kinki Studio EX-M7 Power Amp Review - A Natural Bare-Knuckle Pugilist
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From the tens of audio manufacturers from the land of the Red Dragon that I came across, I can count about three of them which are really proud about their identity and achievements. Without a doubt, on top of this very short list stays the funky Kinki Studio team. With a simple but powerful message as “We Come From China” stamped on all their units and on the first page of their user manuals, it is clear that Kinki Studio is not kinky at all about their name or identity. Having a chin up, being honest and unique, believing in yourself is the only way to succeed. These are my ways of life that I follow and cherish and when I’m seeing other ones embracing those things, I need to mention them. Kinki is that kind of company and wish they will never change.
Kinki Studio is a relatively new team in the overgrowing landscape of audio manufacturers and in the latest two or so years, I’ve sensed a big push towards International markets with lots of written and video reviews popping here and there for this particular manufacturer. Kinki Studio is also a very positive thinking and quite a funny team as well. When I started my introduction to my Kinki Studio Vision THR-1 headphone amp review , my wife told that I had too many jokes in there and it might upset them. I published blindly both my reviews and I’ve got back only tons of laughs and positive vibes from the team.
THR-1 was one of the most powerful headphone amps I’ve tested at that time and one of the most natural sounding one as well. When I’ve sent back the loaner unit, I wished I could borrow that naturalness and plant it inside the Benchmark HPA4 that I am using daily. You can’t eat your cake and have it too, right?
Fast forward a few months, I was giving a difficult task of testing their newest and freshly released EX-M7 (M7 from now on) power amplifier. Difficult? Hah! I was screaming inside with joy as I never tested anything from their EX (Extreme Series) line of products, so it will come more as a pleasure and not as a task to finish.
Not going to lie, that this is my first DC-coupled, ultra-wide-band 0 Hz to 2.5 MHz power amplifier I have tested to date, with a stunning Signal to Noise ratio of 130 dB (A-Weighted) and with a whopping 400 Watts of instantaneous power into 8 Ohms, EX-M7 got some really interesting stuff going on the inside, so let’s check it out in a very Soundnews (read: in-depth) way.
I’ve received a lot of big boxes but the one for M7 was the mothership or all card-board boxes I’ve got so far. Hegel H190, Keces S125, Audio-GD R7 or Denafrips Venus boxes suddenly felt tiny and really meaningless by comparison. It was not only extremely large but heavy weight as well; I already knew that a beast is dwelling deep inside that box. M7 came double boxed and the product box was filled with an unhealthy amount of extra-foam for protection. This loaner unit did a long way towards me and the outer box had a few bumps in the corners, but luckily the smaller box looked absolutely intact. Inside it you will find only the power amp itself, a simple instruction manual and a power cable. As with all power amplifiers, nothing more is really needed to put it to hard work.
M7 is simply build like a tank with very thick front and lateral panels and I had absolutely the same first impression about the Kinki THR-1 when I first saw and touched it. Any wireless interference should not affect its performance even in a very revealing system. The front panel has a thickness of about 11 mm and left and right panels a thickness of 8 mm. As for the size, it is simply massive and it dwarfed every single integrated or power amplifier I used to this date. I used to think that my Cambridge Azur 851A was big and Keces S125 power amp is pretty big too. What a joke. M7 is considerably larger than any of those and it is much heavier too. I could barely fit it on a shelf in my speaker setup and in all honesty, I probably need a proper Hi-Fi rack for a much better ventilation and heat dissipation. Oh, about that, I never saw such a clever and proper way of dealing with heat. See those gold painted perforated aluminum blocks? The holes on them will go completely through the amplifier and the air that passes through them will cool down that extremely powerful output stage. I’ve seen lateral heatsinks, internal heatsinks, using the whole case as a massive heatsink, but drilling holes so that air could move freely in and out and heat would go away instantly, that is some clever thinking from the Kinki Studio team. I’m impressed.
The cool approach, literally and figuratively doesn’t stop here. Kinki Studio designed their M7 as a modular and easy to service device. They actually prepared a complete guide for their M7, with it you can troubleshoot any issues you might have with this one. In case something goes bad, it can be serviced at home without the need of a highly skilled professional. An amp board went bad? Simply replace it with another one using only home tools. How cool is that?
Weighting some serious 25 kilos or slightly more than 55 pounds, some heavy-duty metal feet would be needed to support all this weight and this is exactly what Kinki Studio did. I really don’t see a point of replacing such beautiful machined metal feet with other ones, it would be pointless…unless you fancy those Gold Viablue QTC spikes to match with the Gold cooling aluminum blocks of M7. That would look classy.
To me, M7 looks like a massive block of aluminum, it screams high quality craftsmanship and I wish more companies from China would adopt such high-quality standards. It looks more industrial than refined to me, with straight lines and bold looks. Forget about WAF , it is out of the window with this one, it is simply too big, way too imposing and if you are planning on getting one, stretch your budget and get a nice gift to your lady as well.
This is where Kinki Studio impressed me again and let me explain you why. I personally know few close friends that are using passive power conditioners with their stereo equipment, only because they have polluted AC lines in their apartments. Without them, they’ll hear only buzzes and hums, completely ruining the listening experience. Kinki decided to incorporate a filtering circuit inside this unit that will remove noise from your power lines. By default, I recommend leaving it at Off position and only if you hear any disturbing hisses, just pop the switch up and you’ll enable the DC filtering, chasing away all those nasty creatures.
If you want to further level-up your listening experience, M7 is also equipped with an Earth / Ground optimization circuit that could further improve your music listening. They also added a Link / Float switch that will enable or disable the power earth with the chassis. You can connect the Earth and/or Ground to the upstream equipment or you can connect the Earth / Ground terminal to the ground box and see for yourself if there is an improvement or not.
Besides all this clever wizardry, you can spot the left and right speaker terminals, the balanced XLR and unbalanced RCA inputs, a high-quality fused Furutech AC inlet and a pair of triggers that can work with the rest of Kinki Studio gear, just in case you’ll want to power them On or Off with a single remote.
On its front plate, there is only a simple On/Off button and a large OLED screen in the middle. The OLED screen will be engaged only for few seconds when you power it On or Off, otherwise three low-intensity LEDs will show its working status: Green light – working in normal conditions, Yellow light – stand-by mode is engaged and Red light means it detected an error and it powered itself Off.
When I moved to our home, I’ve completely rebuilt the electric AC lines, with high-quality OCC wiring, adding a simple yet effective passive conditioner. Only my office and the living room is wired to that passive conditioner. In my particular case, the DC filter switch isn’t doing anything at all, as I am experiencing a buzz and hum-free performance with the DC filtering disengaged, but that can be a different story in your listening room. I recommend experimenting with and without DC filtering and the same can be said about Ground and Earth terminals.
As I said it before, M7 is a direct DC coupled power amplifier, meaning that it doesn’t have a single capacitor in the signal path, all the caps you see are used only for power filtering or for storing power for high dynamic swings. You should know that M7 is working in Class-AB, meaning that is consumes a lot of power, offers a lot of power in return and dissipates a lot of heat as well.
With a direct DC coupled design, offering a continuous power of 250W into 8 Ohms, 420W into 4 Ohms and almost double that number for some instantaneous dynamic swings, should result an ultra-fast response time, some world-class dynamics and an amazing transient response without affecting refinement or the detail and the transparency of the sound.
M7 is drawing power from two oversized and encapsulated 400VA toroidal transformers that can provide up to 72 Volts DC and 18 A peak current! I’m sorry, but all my past power amplifiers and integrated ones are sitting numb and silently in a corner. In terms of specs, the big guy simply outperformed them all.
The incredible spec sheet doesn’t stop here: 4 Exicon mosfets are driving the output stage – these are among the best you could possibly have, there are also 4 output transistors per channel (8 in total) that should provide an instant power delivery to your loudspeakers, some high-performance Mundorf caps for power filtering, 8 incredibly large blue caps per channel for storing DC power, another 2 smaller toroidal transformers, I see some juicy and oversized ceramic resistors, and the list goes on and on.
M7 will consume 30W at idle and 700 W at max output, so its clear that it knows how to move those speaker drivers, or should I say pound those drivers with an unstoppable force. Another great thing that I spotted much later on is the lower input sensitivity of 1.45 Vrms, meaning that it will work nice with low and high-voltage preamplifiers and volume shouldn’t be an issue with low output devices such as portable DAPs or entry level DACs with volume control.
Kinki Studio equipped this unit with a speaker protection circuit and in an event of mis-operation or malfunction of the speakers, the protection circuit will immediately shut-down the amplifier to protect it and the speakers from further damage.
Since the Audiobyte HydraVox is still making rounds among few of my friends, I used the Matrix Audio Element X as the streamer and DAC to squeeze the last bit of performance out of EX-M7. Element X already incorporates a hybrid analog/digital preamp section so I connected it directly to the Kinki unit. Later on, I also added the Benchmark HPA4 as a dedicated preamp in my system to see If I can further improve the listening experience. I used the Buchardt S400 loudspeakers with them and sincerely EX-M7 may be an overkill power amp for speakers of this size. With all that said, if you ever listened to some premium speakers from Denmark like Dynaudio or Buchardt, you would know that those can really scale with a powerful amplifier that could offer an instant power delivery.
Ok everyone, it is time to have a proper listen to the Big Boy.
I was quite happy unboxing and connecting it to everything, then suddenly out of the blue I get an email informing me that at least 300 hours of burn-in is recommended for it to shine bright in a stereo setup. I was actually expecting that. With so many capacitors, 4 toroidal transformers, fresh transistors and mosfets, I knew that at least 2 painful weeks of burn-in will be needed to unleash the full potential of this unit. Easier said than done, as every single day I would pass by the living room, I would sit for few minutes and would listen to whatever my Tidal playlist would play in that particular day. I think in the 3-rd day my rock playlist started playing and somewhere at noon Tidal finished it and started playing some recommended tracks. The shock came when Points of Authority by Linkin Park ( Tidal / Spotify ) started playing (I know, don’t judge). The bass impact on the 00:19, 00:25, 00:35 and 00:40 marks was simply out of this world. I don’t mean that it was simply going down low in a very detailed manner, I mean the pure raw impact and kick in the bass that M7 created was unheard off.
Do note that S400 has a huge passive radiator on back, yes, it’s passive and according to its creator, it eats watts for breakfast with fast energetic music. This is precisely why S400 sounded super snappy only with juicy power amplifiers and more than decent with integrated amplifiers. Even at day three, I knew that in terms of sheer bass slam – that is simply the most difficult thing to achieve in any amplifier, M7 was simply the best I’ve experienced thus far with the normal sized Buchardt S400. I’ve already mentioned in their dedicated review that a Hegel H190 and then a Keces S125 were doing sweet love with them awakening some impressive dynamics in the process, but M7 felt like going all-in and deep with the Buchardt’s. It pounded so hard, that I ran back to the office, I engaged my headphone setup which I knew is world class in terms of bass (Audeze LCD-4 and Kennerton Magni driven by the Benchmark HPA4) and to my surprise, the sheer kick and slam into my eardrums was considerably lower than what I’ve heard on the tiny S400 driven by that goliath of an amplifier. Even at its third day, I was ready to say that M7 is most probably an overkill power amplifier for the likes of S400, but that doesn’t mean Buchardt’s didn’t scale, because they really did and what a pleasant surprise for a transient response nut as myself.
The following days, M7 did change a bit, I wouldn’t say it went from the bright to the dark side or vice-versa, because that would not be true, but the biggest change was felt in terms of speed and in terms of smoothness or liquidity. Its tonality was already great from the first day.
Oh, speaking about its tonality, it is important to say that I have experienced Exicon mosfets only in their THR-1 headphone amplifier that had this bold, heavy tonality with a big impact in the bass and midrange area, being slightly shy and mellow in the treble area. THR-1 was heavy sounding and slightly blunt in terms of speed, because I always wanted just a little bit more attack. Compared to that one (apples to oranges, really), EX-M7 doesn’t stutter at all, it is as nimble and as fast as the best I’ve experienced thus far. I will go as far and say that after 2 weeks of burn-in, passing the recommended 300 burn-in time, M7 is really all about speed, about kick and impact, about naturalness, it has a perfect bass and midrange performance, with a grain-free approach to treble reproduction.
Before talking about noise floor, you should know that Matrix Element X is already a very serious stopping force for anything that has to do with digital jitter. There wasn’t a day, when I’ve experienced dirty and muddy background with this unit, so I’m pretty sure it already cleans up that nasty noise, hiss or hum. Another thing to add is that when I’m using its internal streamer, USB connection goes out of the discussion, so again the jitter that might come from a noisy PC is nowhere to be found. Lastly, the costly power lines that I implemented at my place really cleaned up the mess I had before that, especially in my office everything sounds crystal clear and engaging from morning till dawn. Even without the Benchmark HPA4 in the chain, Element X + M7 was simply an amazing match and even at very high volumes, I couldn’t spot a dirty background. I went as far as approaching the speakers at an angle so I could preserve my hearing and I cranked the volume a bit higher than usual. I was 22 dB away until unity gain of 0 dB (max volume) and still, S400 sounded clean, without a trace of distortion or disturbing noise.
Even with that DC Filtering set to Off position, sound was crystal clear and dark as night. In the past I’ve experienced multiple power amps that were raising distortion at higher volumes, but with such a high-performance power filtering inside this unit and a lot of power to spare, M7 is simply free of any noise at any volume position.
S400 are both quite sensitive for low-level listening
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