Chord SPM 1050 Stereo Power Amp (TAS 196)

Cool Under Fire

While most high-end audio firms are small artisan-minded affairs that were founded by guys whose passions border on or exceed the obsessive, most of the design and production facilities I’ve visited appear to be anything but a spark to the creative process. To get a feel for what I mean, picture your typical suburban industrial park, with rows of nondescript buildings housing everything from skateboard manufacturing companies to shoe distribution warehouses to those thinking up the latest, uh, toys…hmm, perhaps I’m being a bit too hastily dismissive here.

The atmosphere is quite a bit more interesting over at England’s Chord Electronics, which occupies a lovely Victorian-era watermill in rural Kent. Inside the brick, timber, and slate “Pumphouse,” which took six months to revamp in 1997 before Chord could move in, founder John Franks and his team are building some of the world’s most coveted electronics.

While the Pumphouse reflects Franks’ interest in architecture, Chord actually began in one of high-end audio’s classic manufacturing facilities—a garage. It was here that Franks, an aerospace engineer whose specialty was designing light, powerful, and highly reliable power supplies for British fighter jets, began tinkering in 1982 at a similarly conceived power supply he hoped to apply to audio amplification. The resulting high-frequency switch-mode power supply (SMPS), which took nearly a decade to bring to market, operates in the 80kHz range—as opposed to the 50-60Hz range of conventional power supplies—simultaneously draws from both the positive and negative rails as the music demands it, and is responsible for the fleet yet powerful dynamic response Chord has become known for. (This is not the same as a switching or “Class D” amplifier, in which the output devices are switched on and off via pulse-width or sigma-delta modulation.)

The problem in the early days, when Franks would make amps for himself, friends, and friends of friends, was that these then new aerospace industry devices were prohibitively expensive for a commercial product.

Putting his dream on hold, Franks for the next eight years worked as a director for a Hong Kong-based power-supply manufacturer that happened to build devices for use in Apple products. As you can imagine, we’re talking millions and millions of power supplies. Franks is not shy to admit that this gig paid handsomely, but he ultimately desired a less hectic life.

As typically happens in the tech world, what was once prohibitively expensive eventually becomes not so, and by the late-80s the cost of these power devices had dropped to a point where Franks decided it was time to revisit his passion. By 1990, he was able to finalize a more “affordable” design, the SPM 1200. (I placed “affordable” in quotation marks because Chord’s products have never been exactly cheap. They currently range from an $5995 Bluetooth DAC (the QBD76) to the $75,000 per pair SPM 14000 monoblock amplifiers.)

Luckily for Franks and his fledgling company, the development of that amplifier happened to coincide with word from friends at Spendor that the BBC was looking for something to replace its old Quad 405 models, which were not consistently controlling the bass frequencies of Spendor’s LS5/8 monitors. Chord submitted an amplifier for review and so impressed the BBC engineers that, in an unusually brief qualification period, the unit was okayed for broadcast use within a mere three weeks.

With that BBC feather in its cap, Chord amplifiers went on to find homes at, to name but a few, Abbey Road, Sony, and Skywalker studios. Franks also likes to point out how this early exposure to the world of pro audio forced him to engineer and build all his gear to very exacting standards.

Of course, Chord has made quite the splash in consumer audio as well, first with its amplification and more recently with digital playback devices.

In an effort to bring its designs to a wider audience, the company recently released its most affordable stereo amps to date: the 130Wpc SPM 650 ($4995), and the 200Wpc SPM 1050 ($6995) I’m writing about here.

To illustrate the impact Chord’s compact power supplies—now in their fifth generation—have had on the size of the company’s amplifiers, the SPM 1050 is only 16.5" wide by 5.25" high and 14" deep, and weighs in at a svelte 33 pounds. Analogies abound, but let’s say that comparing the 1050 to 200-watt models from most American manufacturers is like comparing a classic American muscle car to a Mini Cooper S. Each has its virtues, but it’s hard to argue that the Mini is not the zippier, easier-to-maneuver vehicle. Another theoretical advantage of smaller power supplies is lower noise. As power supplies and transformers get larger, they typically introduce more noise into the signal. Chord feels that its smaller, more nimble supplies have a lower noise floor, allowing more texture and harmonic complexity to be expressed.