Amps.. Is Odyssey worth it?

re: "Having read this far in the post, including the very thorough response from Klaus, I find myself thinking:

1. I would really like to talk to this man"

Klaus is great! I bought a Khartago++ amp from him about 7 years ago, which he’s done some further revisions on. It is excellent, and I won’t sell it even if I can ever afford the the Ayre amp I might like for 5x more. I might get a Kismet though. The Khartago replaced a McCormack Audio DNA-1, which was a stellar amp in its day. 

You’ll find Odyssey Amps recommended as best budget amps by Absolute Sound and Jonathan Valin for many years now. Mr. Wolf of Magico uses them as one of his reference amps. Mine has been outstanding, and I have it paired with excellent speakers—Vandersteen Treo CTs, with $2500 cables and a good front end. 

As to speaking with Klaus—we have had many great conversations late at night (he works the graveyard shift by choice). He is warm, funny, helpful, and amazingly knowledgeable. I never have trouble getting ahold of him...usually takes no more than a day and sometimes he calls me right back. I’ve missed seeing him at the Seattle audio show but hope to rectify that somewhere. 

Odyssey is a very small operation, and it’s uncommon to be able to deal directly with the designer/builder these days for bigger companies (though you can, with smaller ones like McCormack, Vandersteen, and some other brands). I don’t expect anyone to "bat" 1000, and Klaus isn’t one to suffer fools or take undeserved abuse, I think. I’ve read threads on his products for years, and there are MANY happy owners like me. I think they are a great value. 

(I have not had a problem with the way they have packaged and shipped my amps either time. Well packed. It’s the shipping companies who are often the culprits, damaging units. I heard from Vandersteen some nightmare horror stories, including a shipment of Sevens ($75k iirc) that the customer waited 4 months to get. The shipping company drove a forklift fork right through one of the boxes, destroying one of the speakers! WTH?)
~Patrick D

I’m a pro A/V and studio tech who ends up doing a lot of repairs and mods on professional audio gear. I recently acquired an Odyssey "Chapman", which appears to be a custom mono block. Anyway, I found this thread while doing research on the amp. 

As to what Klaus said, I wanted to clarify that hum in an audio system, especially an unbalanced, home/consumer system can come from SO many places. It should only be his job to provide you with a properly working amplifier, not to troubleshoot your wiring, grounding loops, the noisy desk lamp with the ground/neutral reversed, the noisy dimmer/chopper your electrician didn’t wire correctly, the bad cable or loose connector somewhere in your system, the noisy mains voltage, the insufficient ground rod, the RFI noise from some massive transformer or high voltage source leaking into a poorly shielded cable or ground lifted piece of equipment, or an old house with missing third prong grounds, or ground bonded to neutral somewhere it shouldn’t be, DC offset on AC line voltage because of leaky electrolytic rectifier caps in some older piece of gear creating transformer hum from an unbalanced load, or etc etc etc etc.

Audio grounding is, at one level very simple, but on another level, very complex, especially when a lot of stuff is going on, like in a house, or electrical grid. There are professional techs who get paid a lot of money to specialize in audio grounding. A poorly grounded/shielded and/or balanced audio path running"the best" and "quietest" gear will have an absolutely atrocious noise floor, whereas a properly grounded/shielded and/or balanced system running "noisy" equipment is likely to be dead quiet in comparison. 

Yes it’s true that a few volts one way or another on AC mains shouldn’t make a noticeable hum problem, but electronics is far more complex than just voltage, and even if it were JUST a question of line voltage, how are you measuring the voltage? With a cheap DMM? Is it true RMS? Peak to peak? How do you know there’s not a DC offset or noise on the line? A DMM likely won’t show that. Is it 60hz? Any other AC freqs present? You should probably use an oscilloscope to know for sure....btw, it’s very easy to fry gear if you’re trying to probe the AC line and put the ground clip of an AC grounded scope in the wrong place.....so good luck with that. 

And that’s all assuming AC mains voltage is the only factor at play here, and it’s definitely not. 

Maybe Klaus should be taking videos of customer gear working perfectly in his (presumably) properly wired environment so that people will be less likely to automatically blame the gear when something isn’t right. IME, even with highly trained and qualified professional audio techs, when something goes wrong, 97% of the time it’s user error.

It’s possible in these scenarios that it’s not user error/user infrastructure....I mean, anything is possible.....the Seattle Mariners could win the next 5 World Series.....it’s possible! 

@jonnydurango - Great post and info. I even understood most of it. 

I think I read the hum was caused by a bad batch of transformers.

Mine is working really well 1 + years.   No hum!     Very musical and open sound stage!