Instruction manual

26
Australian
ON TESTON TEST
tube ‘Mu’ stage and designer of the world’s
best modifi cation kit for the Dynaco ST-70.
According to Dan Wright, at the heart of the
ModWright KWA 100 and KWA-100SE power
amplifi ers is a single voltage gain stage called
the ‘Solid State Music Stage’ that was devel-
oped by Kimmel. I don’t know how much of
Kimmel’s handiwork is incorporated in the
KWI 200, but ModWright’s website says of
the KWI 200 that it was ‘styled after the LS
100 and KWA 100SE in look and overall di-
mensions’ and that it, too, uses a ‘Solid State
U
S company Modwright is owned
by Dan Wright, which makes it
pretty obvious where the ‘Wright’
bit came from, but if you’re
wondering about what the ‘Mod’ bit means,
it came about because Wright started out in
business by modifying other manufacturer’s
products. In fact he still does so, in the form
of a number of highly-regarded modifi cations
for the Oppo BDP-83, BDP-95, Sony XA-
5400ES and the Logitec Transporter, amongst
other products. As many of his modifi cations
involved substituting passive components
such as capacitors, Modwright designed some
of its own capacitors and now does a roaring
trade in selling them to the DIY audiophile
community. One of his most popular lines
is a range of ‘M-Series’ capacitors that have
oil-impregnated metallised polypropylene
dielectrics and pure copper tinned leads.
THE EQUIPMENT
Dan Wright isn’t the only designer behind
ModWright’s extensive range of power and
integrated amplifi ers and preamplifi ers. He
also commissions external designers, one
of the most famous of which is none other
than Alan Kimmel, creator of the vacuum
Music Stage.’ Perhaps most signifi cant is that
the ‘KW’ in KWI stands for Kimmel/Wright.
Although the KWI 200 supplied to us for
review was the basic offering—an integrated
amplifi er—it’s possible to optionally add a
built-in DAC and dual MC/MM phono stages.
The idea, according to ModWright, is that ‘the
KWI 200 is designed to be the one-box solution
for the modern age. Just add speakers and power!’
Before I opened the casing to check the
internals, I thought the KWI 200 was very
much an ‘old-school’ design, but it didn’t
take long for me to discover that it’s anything
but. For example, volume control is imple-
mented not by a standard rotary potenti-
ometer but instead via a digitally controlled
analog volume control with a buffered input
to the Solid State Music Stage. What is cer-
tainly ‘old school’ is that the KWI 200 has a
hugely overdesigned linear power supply, at
the heart of which is a massive 1.5kVA toroi-
dal power transformer. Storage and smooth-
ing is the domain of two capacitor banks that
between them provide more than 234,000µF
microfarads of fall-back power. The output
stage employs four pairs of MOSFET devices
per channel. Curiously, I could not see any
of ModWright’s distinctive white capacitors
Power Output: Single channel driven into 8-ohm,
4-ohm and 2-ohm non-inductive loads at 20Hz,
1kHz and 20kHz. [Modwright KWI 200]
Modwright KWI 200
INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER