I should have trusted my ears. When I first encountered Infigo (pronounced In-FEE’-go) electronics, paired with Alta Audio’s Adam loudspeaker, at T.H.E. Show 2022 in Long Beach, California, I wrote, “Timbres were beautiful on bass and high-pitched percussion. The chimes and vibes sounded special and clean, colors were plentiful, and deep bass was all of one piece.” Nor was I exaggerating. In that system, Infigo’s Method 3 monoblocks ($55,000/pair) pleased my ears as much as their blue-illumined interiors delighted my eyes.
Rather quickly, Editor Jim Austin suggested I review the Method 3. Perhaps he’d already been tipped off by Ken Micallef’s praise when he first encountered Infigo in November 2021 at the Capital Audio Fest, and by the ensuing buzz (footnote 1). I was concerned, though, that the Infigo Method 3s might not be able to drive my Wilson Audio Alexia 2s. Even though Infigo owner/designer Hans Looman assured me that they would, “no problem,” I decided to hold off until I could listen to the amplifiers again.
Some months later, I encountered the same pairing at the inaugural Pacific Audio Fest. Describing that experience, I wrote, “Smoothness was the system’s strong suit, dwarfing (in this room) layering, detail, dynamics, and grandeur. Then again, sound on a 16/44.1 file of Chabrier’s España was the most liquid of anything I heard at the show up to midday. … Absolutely the right timbre and sound quality for this music. … Equally impressive was the beautiful guitar sound on a 24/176.4 transfer of the Mercury Living Presence LP of The Romeros playing Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. The sound was superb.”
Shortly after that, the somewhat easier to drive Wilson Alexia Vs entered my system. More confident that the Method 3 would mate well with my speakers, I requested review samples.
In retrospect, now that I’ve spent several weeks with the Infigos in my reference system, I wish I’d said “yes” at first opportunity.
The man and the company
Infigo means “impressive” in Latin; that word also describes Looman, the designer and company founder. Even as a child in The Netherlands, at a time when people were switching their televisions from tubed to transistor, he already knew that his future would be in electronics.
“I was always going through the garbage and pulling tubes out of old TVs,” he told me during his visit to Port Townsend to install a pair of Method 3s. “It drove my parents nuts. I was always picking things apart to learn how they worked, with an eye on the future.”
In 1986, after specializing in analog technology and digital technology during his undergraduate and graduate studies in Delft and Utrecht, Looman founded a company that specialized in measuring techniques. He started out measuring water quality, and nanovolt charges on particles in paper pulp. Measurement remained one of his two passions; the other was music. Even as he took the company full-time, in 1991, he played classical guitar. Later, he took up trumpet and French horn. Some Friday evenings, he made music with other guitar-playing friends. “I can’t sit still, so I was always making music when I wasn’t measuring things.”
Wishing to understand why different amplifiers completely changed the sound of audio systems, he headed down “a deep rabbit hole” and approached amplification from a different point of view than many. “I treated music as if it were my nanovolt charges on particles in paper pulp, if you will,” he said. “Those charges are so delicate that they will change or be destroyed if you touch them. I looked at all aspects of audio because there is so much more than meets the ear. Then, I built an input section that measured far beyond 20Hz20kHz and would be completely pure sonically.”
During the worldwide recession at the start of the new millennium, everything Looman had built over two decades fell apart in the span of two years. Needing to start over, he and his wife accepted an offer from Canadian relatives, wrapped their entire life up in a 40′ container, and headed to Kelowna, British Columbia. There, Looman started a new electronics assembly company. After learning that Resonessence Labs, a spinoff of Kelowna-headquartered chipmaker ESS, needed someone to build their first series of D/A converters, Looman began consulting for Resonessence, establishing its presence at audio shows. He took the first show-ready version of his amplifier to the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, with Resonessence, in 2011.
On Valentine’s Day 2020, after Resonessence shut down, Looman founded Infigo Audio. Not a month later, the pandemic hit and audio shows went on hiatus. He focused his time on development, of amplifiers and a new DAC. He “basically engineered the Resonessence DAC the way I thought they should have engineered the thing,” he told me; the result was the Infigo DAC, the Method 4. By November 2021, when Infigo products finally debuted at the Capital Audiofest, Looman had both a DAC and amplifiers ready for Ken Micallef to hear.
There’s another aspect to the Looman story, which is still unfolding: a budding recording career. The same year he landed in British Columbia, Looman began making archival recordings for the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra (OSO) and Youth Orchestra (OSYO). “One of the most interesting recordings I did was … of Keith Emerson (of Emerson, Lake & Palmer) performed by the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra in 2015 as part of a filmed biography, which landed me an entry in the IMDb,” he explained. “My recording method is a spinoff of an audio measurement technology I am working on to visualize the depth and focus of a stereo field.”
Technical details
Looman built his first prototype amplifier in 1998. “I was already sure that I needed to build a class-A amplifier, because those sounded the best to me,” he said. “Unfortunately, they ran so hot that I couldn’t even touch my 1W class-A amplifier. Wondering what I could do to create that good class-A sound without cooking the room kept me up at night.
“I decided that the brute-force [approach] of always running the entire current that a speaker would ever need through the amplifier was not the cleverest way of doing it. It puts a lot of stress on the components, sometimes shortening their life. And if something is constantly pumping its maximum load, it’s not as agile or capable of performing in linear fashion. Finally, after three years at the design bench, I dreamed the solution at 1am. By 6am, I had changed my 1W amplifier, and the solution worked.”
Looman strove to preserve the sound quality of his 1W amp while scaling up the power and ensuring the design would not run hot. “I’m not going to give away the entire secret sauce,” he said, “but my amps run cold and only consume maybe 25 or so watts on top of what you need to run your speakers. If you’re running 100W into your speakers, the amps will eat maybe 125W or 130W. So only this 25W or 30W will be consumed into heat. But the power is there to ensure that all transistors are open and at the ready. You never have crossover distortion. Instead, you have the beautiful sound of class-A with ultrafast transient response.”
Looman is proud of the company’s “DC Bias Adjustment System,” which he says balances output DC level without limiting low-frequency output. He strove to eliminate phase distortion as well, by eliminating capacitors in the signal path. Low frequencies extend down to 0Hz, he told me, with a separate protection circuit that disconnects the speakers when the DC level gets too high.
How powerful is the Method 3? Looman said the Method 3 will handle dips below an ohm, but it won’t double its power output all the way down. As for the amp’s extension way beyond 20kHz and its ability to run cool, Looman said that the amp’s heatsink is full of hundreds of superfast bipolar transistors. “If you use a lot of very small devices to spread heat over a large area, they are extremely nimble and fast, and each contributes to the power output. An analogy is to a rope-pulling contest. If you have four very big guys on one end and 400 kids on the other end, you know the kids are going to win.”
The Method 3’s curved heatsink eliminates mechanical resonance, Looman told me. “Even if you put the amps very close to a loudspeaker, they remain sonically dead. The idea for the heatsinks came to me after I took one of my prototypes to Westlake Audio and the guy said they were singing like xylophones.”
Footnote 1: Actually, I had heard them, too, also with the Alta Audio Adams, at an event at the VPI House in Old Bridge, New Jersey.Jim Austin
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Infigo Audio Inc.
1395 Stevens Rd. Unit 1B
Kelowna
BC, V1Z 2S9, Canada
(888) 463-4465
infigoaudio.com
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