The best of tubes and the best of solid-state in a fully dual mono design with top-shelf components and sophisticated power supplies.
"I can't believe they're selling it at this price!" That's the first reaction of anyone who peeks into the Floyd Design PrimaLuna EVO 300 Hybrid, filled to nearly bursting with the highest quality components.
The EVO 300 Hybrid uses the same preamp gain stage as the award-winning PrimaLuna EVO 400 Preamplifier, which was designed by Marcel Croese, former chief engineer, Goldmund Switzerland. That means all-tube and dual mono. The only thing we left out was tube rectification because it isn't appropriate for this application. It took two years of research and experimentation to perfectly pair it with the output circuit designed by Jan de Groot who has designed all of PrimaLuna’s MOSFET circuits, and was behind all the Sphinx Audio designs from 1995 to 2000.
Apart from combining tube magic with solid state control, the EVO 300 Hybrid focuses on lowering source impedance while also lowering noise, offering the highest possible fidelity and bandwidth.
Tube in the Front, Solid State in the Back
The input stages of the EVO 300 Hybrid use two 12AU7 tubes in the gain stages, and four 12AU7 driver tubes. The doubled driver tubes ensure a lower impedance on the output stages, allowing for large dynamics, a huge soundstage, and lots of beautiful harmonics and texture.
The solid-state output stages use cascading JFETs from Linear Systems and each channel boasts two complementary pairs of MOSFETs from Exicon. These MOSFETS are exotic and custom-designed and built and are not available to anyone else! The setup is calibrated to offer the lowest impedance, and the 100 W into 8 ohms (160 W into 4 ohms) power sounds massive, allowing this amp to preserve tube glory while offering the excellent grip, low-bass power and control that MOSFETs are known for.
The most crucial capacitors, the ones in the signal path, are extremely expensive tin-foil caps that are made in Europe. Elsewhere, even the caps outside the signal path are the top-quality models that modders use to upgrade their regular amps!
The Power Supply is Everything
The power supply in the EVO 300 Hybrid is extremely complex. Increasingly, manufacturers are realizing that there’s more to power supplies than was ever thought before and that their design has a huge effect on the sound of the amp. For example, a power supply inductor can work as a second-order harmonic filter, so every part has to be carefully considered for its sonic qualities.
The amplifier uses a custom-wound set of potted toroidal transformers for true dual mono. It also has a pair of PrimaLuna’s custom-designed AC offset killers that the company is world-famous for. There is extensive shielding in various parts of the amplifier to block any noise from the main power supply getting into the delicate preamp section.
Looking into the chassis of the EVO 300 Hybrid, you will see a red glow of LEDs, reminiscent of the glow of tube filaments. This isn't just a cosmetic touch. Apart from emitting light, LEDs can function as low-noise, extremely quick diodes in electronic circuits. Designers have found that red LEDs in particular offer the best performance when used this way.
The PrimaLuna Hybrid's power supply circuits use high-performance LEDs at critical points, offering various circuits in its extremely sophisticated power supply, their own supply of low-noise electrical power.
TRANSFORMER-COUPLED HEADPHONE AMPLIFIER
One of the best headphone amps in the world. Most integrated amps use a solid state op-amp chip for running headphones. Stand alone headphone amps will vary in quality like any other amplifier. Headphones are simply small speakers that require less power. Some amps will use smaller output tubes that groan to have enough dissipation to run power-hungry planar headphones. This is how we do it. We simply took advantage of the fact that we make the best tube integrated amplifiers. We designed the same way with the Hybrid Integrated Amplifier. Now you don't have to pay for a separate state of the art headphone amp. PrimaLuna integrateds are the favorite of owners who use everything from Audeze to Hifiman to Sennheiser.
FLOYD DESIGN SPECIFICALLY-MANUFACTURED MOSFET SOLID-STATE POWER AMPLIFIER
Too often, hybrid amps turn out to be less than the sum of their parts – a mismatch, both technically and sonically. It's essential to choose solid-state components that behave similarly to a tube. PrimaLuna EVO 300 Hybrid Integrated Amplifier's MOSFETs, used in the power stages, share similar characteristics with tubes.
Floyd Design's Jan de Groot has created amps with MOSFETs for 26 years. These MOSFETs are specifically designed to pair with our most successful PrimaLuna pre-stages, matched for the best sound quality possible and mounted it in one chassis; Et voilà!
The PrimaLuna EVO 300 Hybrid Integrated Amplifier is unlike any other HYBRID Integrated Amplifier on the market. You can SEE that, and you can HEAR that. We wanted the BEST HYBRID possible, and we knew it would become a more expensive unit. After the final fine-tuning and listening tests, we can easily accept and justify that!