In a world where a small footprint is a desirable and ever more trendy thing there are very few amplifiers this petite. Plenty of small amplifiers but this one has an exceptional power to footprint ratio.
The smallest of the new Nano range from Massive Audio, there are four in the range and very carefully aimed at serious-but-not-rich ice hounds. There’s a four channel class AB called NX4 and the N2 here has a bigger N3 brother that can do 1400w RMS at an Ohm and there’s a whacker called N4 that has a cool 2,000w RMS output. The amp is worldwide standards compliant with firstly the reassuring CEA 2006 for veracity as to power claims but also RoSH, CE and E8. All are just over two inches or around fifty five millimetres thick and narrow as well.
They have a dark finish and are well bolted together with Chrome Allen headed bolts. There are skinny but strong feet at each corner and a central channel down the outside of the heatsink that is instrumental in the fixing of the joining pieces and end caps. First, there is the NEX connector piece to join any two amps into one long one. Then there’s the NE end cap that fits them all, one called NE3 that makes an NX4 and an N3 the same length and a fully five inch long piece NE2 that makes the NX4 and N2 the same length. Likewise but just shorter there is the NE4 that makes the NX4 and N4 match. This seems insane until you find out that these amps are ground-up designed to be mountable stacked up as you have seen before but also sideways. Four different combinations of systems are shown in the ‘quick guide’ sheet you get about stacking and line arrays of the product.
There are no fuses on board and on this smallest amp you get square compression grips whereas the N3 and N4 get a bigger power terminal set. There is also a dual set of paralleled speaker terminals of the same type as the power with a CEA mark on the end. The other end has the power and protect LEDs and RCA stereo inputs. There’s a three position switch for bass boost at zero, six or twelve dB, centred at a relatively high 50Hz. The lowpass filter is steep and the subsonic filter says “Off to 50Hz” but ‘pon the netz says that ‘off’ is ten Hertz. There is a round micro jack plug socket near the RCAs for a remote bass gain device, which is optional. Most Impressive Feature is the low voltage protector circuit. It offends me deeply that so very, very many monstrously powerful car amps out there can be killed by sucking the jugular of their car’s power system too hard. It always struck me as madness not to feature this sort of protection as it’s what they DO, but it’s very rare indeed.