genlabs
New Member
At this point I am biased because of the amount of time & effort I have in my ML amp but I will try to be fair. I have a modified A202 that can hold its own! I also have a pair of 502's. They are all decent & capable amps. But you must remember the 02 series was trying to meet a price point. The ML has military grade components at every turn. The price point for ML is "If you have to ask you can't afford it". Don't get me wrong. I am not a snob when it comes to this. I will admit I would never be able to afford new ML gear. My ML was purchased in very bad condition for a low price. It had a vaporized current gain board (see current concerns below), and main caps that released black syrupy goo all over the place. It was a lengthy and costly project to get it back to working condition. I was fortunate in that I had made a connection with an audio enthusiast in another country. He hooked me up with information about a place that was raided by Police. They just happened to have some spare ML boards that were going to auction as a result. Modifying my ML to be unique and the worlds only polished ML was quite labor intensive too.
ML WILL NOT SELL ANY PARTS FOR ANY OF THEIR GEAR TO THE PUBLIC. THEY ONLY SELL PARTS TO 3 AUTHORIZED SERVICE CENTERS. THE SERVICE CENTERS WILL NOT EVEN LISTEN TO REQUESTS FOR PARTS. YOU EITHER SEND THE ENTIRE UNIT IN OR NOTHING. THE TYPICAL SERVICE CHARGE IS USUALLY AROUND $1000 OR MORE. CRATING & SHIPPING A 150 LB AMP IS NOT EASY AND NOT CHEAP. THIS IS ONE REASON I WOULD NOT BUY NEW GEAR FROM THEM, EVEN IF I COULD AFFORD IT. WOULD YOU BUY A CAR THAT YOU COULDN'T BUY SPARE LIGHT BULBS OR BRAKE PADS FOR?
I want you to open your refrigerator and look at a can of of Coca Cola. That is the size of the main caps in the ML. There are four of those Coke cans sitting in there for direct consumption by the output stages. It doesn't stop there. There are also four more smaller (but still large for an amp) caps for feeding the various other stages, which are biased A class. That is all fed by three toroid transformers. Each channel gets its own huge transformer and the logic circuits get a dedicated small toroid. The large transformers are housed in a metal isolation tunnel in the middle if the amp. The transformers are mounted vertically to save space. On power-up the in-rush current is so high that no typical outlet could support it. The initial violent in-rush is temporarily routed through special resistors that can flash off the excess current as heat for about 5 seconds, feeding the caps a dosed amount of current until they are full. This saves the life of the caps too, preventing a slam of inbound electrons.
The ML will perform better because it just plain can. It has so much reserve that it will never reach a point of output stage starvation. The amp will consume 325 watts of AC power just standing still with no audio coming out of it. If you are driving an amp like this that hard something else is going to give. The ML will just go until your speakers give up the ghost. If you need to go that loud then your primary focus is not fidelity anymore. You might as well get a stack of industrial Crown amps and a speaker array hung from your ceiling.
The ML does well in the area I like to call "dark-lows". I think most would call this the thickness of the sound. It faithfully brings those lower, often diminished, frequencies into my soundscape. The SAE can do it as well but may need coaxing with a few db of EQ in the "feel-not-heard" frequency bands. The big difference is the ML won't break a sweat wasting current on these power hungry regions. Forgive my non-scientific descriptions.
The transformer in the attached photo is not from an ML amp, so displayed voltages on label may not be correct. I never thought to remove those hunks copper for a photo. I got this stock image from Google. I only show it for size & orientation reference.
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