According to the company blurb, Flying Mole embodies the concept of "accomplishing the impossible by tireless efforts underground". This is surely the sort of phrase that only the Japanese could have thought up. A small company that specialises in digital amplification, Flying Mole started out building little monoblocks for the professional world and has now started to make some rather distinctive integrated and pre/power designs.
The company was formed in November 2000 as a ‘fabless' organisation, which means it doesn't manufacture but concentrates on planning, designing and selling. The people involved are a "group of engineers with an entrepreneurial spirit", quite a few of whom were formally with the Yamaha corporation. This is how Flying Mole ended up with Ian Galloway, formerly Yamaha UK's managing director, as its distributor – without that connection the two would have been very unlikely to have hooked up.
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The CA-S10 is the middle model of three domestic amplifiers. There's a single-input CA-S3 of tiny proportions at half the price and a pre/power combo with the same 100-watt output for twice the price. The compact nature of the rather attractive casework is a reflection of the digital internals – the
Flying Moles use Class D PWM (pulse width modulation) technology and the CA-S10 has a variant called bi-phase PWM, which splits the signal prior to amplification. It doesn't have a regular mains transformer, but relies on switching power supplies – one for each channel – making it one of the only dual-mono amps in its price range. This approach makes the amp extremely efficient compared to Class AB designs. It does get warm but not enough to warrant ventilation or heat sinking, and its power consumption at idle is a mere six watts – very green.
It is also beautifully built, the casework being of a standard that only the Japanese can produce at this price. All this power and hi-tech internals, combined with great casework, means that savings have to be made somewhere. In this instance, it's in the feature and input department – this is the first $2499 integrated we've seen in a long while that doesn't offer remote operation. It's also rather peculiar for having only three inputs and a single preamp output, which reflects its purist aspirations. Flying Mole is clearly trying to make the best-sounding amplifier it can for the price and given the degree to which it has succeeded you have to respect its approach.
