Musical Fidelity A1:

Back in the mid 1990s, I sketched out the schematic of my A1 while servicing it. A few years later, in response to queries on Usenet, I scanned the drawing for a handful of interested parties which resulted in many discussions about it.

A while back I was contacted by Tim de Paravicini, who originally designed the amplifier for Musical Fidelity. Now that I have a much better understanding of the circuit, I have updated the technical pages in light of this. I'd like to thank Tim for his invaluable input, and also apologise to him because it's taken me a long time to update these pages. And thanks are also due to the numerous contributors who have helped me to make this section more complete.

General Information:

• Introduction and model history.

Technical:

• Construction and disassembly, circuit description.
• Later models.
• Faults and maintenance.
• Mods - improving the performance.

Related Musical Fidelity models:

• The A1 David
• The A1 Final Edition
• The A100 and MA50
• The B200 and MAxxx MOSFET amplifiers

Service:

Musical Fidelity can still service many of these old amplifiers; search their website for "Fine Tuning". You'll need deep pockets, and it's fair to say that their descriptions of work aren't strictly accurate (e.g. just at random, there are no output chokes in the A1 or B200, not is there any software to upgrade in the latter!).

Currently, life is too busy for me to offer you a repair service. This might change in the future - if so, I'll announce it here. But feel free to ask me for help and advice - there's a chance I can offer some basic assistance.

A better bet would be to contact Jez at Arkless Electronics. He used to work in Musical Fidelity's service department back in the early 1990s, and is very familiar with these products. Please do bear in mind that he is running a business, and won't have the time available to enter into lengthy correspondence about the amplifier that you might be trying to fix yourself.