Two powerful home cinema amplifiers from Musical Fidelity

Last autumn, Musical Fidelity unveiled a beast of an amplifier, the 7-channel M6x 250.7. An amplifier that the manufacturer claims, with its 250 watts per channel, has enough power to move the entire cinema – or concert hall – into the home.

But what if you don’t need seven channels, but five will do? Now, there’s an alternative in the form of the M6x 250.5. Identical structure, but with fewer channels.

Conversely, what if you need to extend a massively immersive home theater with Dolby Atmos or DTS:X – or both? Then you can make your dreams come true with the 11-channel M6x 250.11.

The big brother has admittedly compromised, with the three front channels each rated at 250 watts, while the remaining eight channels are limited to 150 watts. Not exactly small potatoes either. For the record, power is quoted in 4 ohms, not 8. But we have no reason to doubt that the amplifiers are still powerful.

Class AB

Here we’re not dealing with Class D or digital amplification, instead we’re talking about two powerful but ‘super quiet’ ring core transformers driving all the channels in traditional Class AB. Linear power supplies are becoming less common because it’s not as efficient as switched mode, and so some power is lost to heat. But according to Musical Fidelity, it is necessary to provide “abnormally wide dynamic range at high sound levels”.

And in case you’re wondering if Musical Fidelity is fudging the numbers, they list a maximum power consumption of 1,500 watts for the M6x 250.5, while it rises to a staggering 2,750 watts for the M6x 250.11! In standby mode, however, they use less than 0.5 watts.

Amplifiers without fans

So although the amp can get hot, Musical Fidelity avoids fans like the plague and uses hefty heatsinks instead. This requires a lot of mass and makes the amp heavy. In these cases, we’re talking about 30.5 kg for the 5-channel and 35.5 kg for the 11-channel.

For the lowest possible noise floor, the amps have balanced XLR inputs for all channels. If your processor doesn’t have this, you can use the gold-plated RCA connectors instead.

The speaker terminals support both spades and banana plugs, and you can of course use stripped cable leads.

So, you want even more power?

Should you for some reason feel you need even more power than these amps are capable of delivering, each channel has an RCA output so you can connect additional power amps. This can be handy if you want to bi-amp the speakers, for example.

Musical Fidelity M6x 250.5 and M6x 250.11: Price and availability

The Musical Fidelity M6x 250.5 and M6x 250.11 are available to order now and cost €2,999 and €3,999 respectively.

More info: musicalfidelity.com

Geir Nordby