The new M400
Monoblock.

400watts · 4ΩPower

The M400 inherits the M800's engineering philosophy intact. At its heart is the same state-of-the-art active power supply approach — active pure power in place of a passive transformer — paired with Darren Myers' strikingly low-feedback topology. The difference between the M400 and the flagship is not one of design integrity but of scale: the M400 is built to deliver reference-grade performance into the power envelope a real-world system actually uses. Assembled by hand in Boulder, Colorado, and brought to perfection by Bob Stadtherr.

The M400 is a monoblock, sold as a pair for stereo. Two hundred watts into 8 ohms — doubling to 400 into 4 — is enough authority for the overwhelming majority of high-performance loudspeakers, from efficient floorstanders to demanding modern transducers. It is the natural choice for the listener who wants genuine reference monoblock performance without the scale, or the cost, of the flagship. For most rooms and most speakers, the M400 will never be the limiting factor in the system.

There is a number on most amplifier spec sheets that deserves far more scrutiny than it gets: the amount of pure Class A bias. Class A is the most linear mode an amplifier can operate in — every transistor conducting through the whole waveform, no crossover point, no handoff, no discontinuity. It is also the most costly, because a Class A stage runs hot and consumes power even at idle. So most amplifiers ration it severely. It is rare for a high-end design to offer even a single watt of true Class A before it slips into the compromises of Class AB — and many that proudly wear the "Class A" label give you only a fraction of one.
The M400 carries 30 watts of pure Class A bias. At the modest power levels where real music actually lives, that 30-watt window covers roughly 60% of normal listening — the great majority of every record you play. Within it, the amplifier never leaves its purest operating mode: no crossover distortion, no class-switching artifacts, no subtle shift in character as the volume rises and falls.
The result is what listeners mean when they describe an amplifier as "natural" — microdynamic detail that survives intact, instrumental textures that sound like the instruments themselves rather than an electronic approximation of them. The M400 does not borrow that quality from the flagship. It is built with it.

Every quality an amplifier is praised for — its authority, its quiet, its sense of effortless control — traces back to one place: the power supply. It is the reservoir the music draws from, and the speed and cleanliness of that reservoir shapes the sound more than almost any other decision a designer makes. For half a century the industry has built that reservoir the same way: a large linear transformer feeding banks of capacitors. It works. But the transformer is the slowest element in the entire signal path, the capacitors cannot return charge without ripple, and the rectifier adds a burst of switching noise every time it conducts.
The M400 is built on a state-of-the-art active power supply — the same architecture that powers the M800, scaled precisely to the M400's 200-watt-into-8-ohm output. "Scaled" is the important word: nothing about the supply's behavior was compromised, only its size. It still delivers current the instant the output stage calls for it, with no rectifier noise, no sag under sustained load, and a residual noise floor low enough to leave the quietest passages genuinely silent.
That is why the M400 doubles its power cleanly into 4 ohms — 400 watts, on demand — without strain. Clean power doubling into a halving impedance is the audible signature of a supply with real reserves. The M400 has them, and it keeps its composure whether the music asks for a whisper or a wall of sound.

There is a measurement most amplifier makers are proud to quote: total harmonic distortion, driven to a vanishingly small number. What the number rarely reveals is how it was achieved. The usual method is large amounts of negative feedback — a correction loop wrapped around the output stage, constantly measuring its error and cancelling it. On a steady test tone, it works beautifully. On music, which is all transients and never steady, the correction always lags a little behind, and the cost is paid in harshness: the leading edge of a note hardens, the sense of a live event glares.
The M400 reaches its low distortion a different way. Darren Myers' topology is engineered to be highly linear before any feedback is applied at all — so only a small, gentle amount is needed to finish the job. This is what "strikingly low overall feedback" means in practice: not an amplifier that distorts more, but one that had far less to correct from the start.
The audible result is a signal path that stays open. Bandwidth extends well beyond 500 kHz, so transients pass through unhurried and uncolored. There is no phase smear, no faint haze of correction artifacts to surface later as listening fatigue. The M400 simply gets out of the way — and the longer you listen, the more clearly you understand that getting out of the way is the single hardest thing an amplifier can be asked to do.