The Boulder 3050s have more power than anything else you can buy, but sheer watts are not the whole story.
A giant metal tunnel runs through the center of the amplifier chassis, with four separate, potted transformers inside, which helps drop all mechanical and electrical noise to the theoretical minimum.
#AUDIO BLOCKS PRICING DRIVER#
Whereas so many products are built in hours, the Boulder 3050 monoblocks take approximately four weeks each to complete, from the time the raw metal enters the dock until the finished, tested and safely crated amplifiers leave.įully balanced, differential power amplifiers from start to finish, the 3050s offer only balanced inputs, and the driver stage consists of Boulder’s latest discrete 99H modules. When orders are ready for a batch of 3000-series components, they work on nothing else until the run is complete. The rest of the employees in the Boulder factory share the same level of enthusiasm for their work, often putting their efforts and expertise into different phases of component production and for different models. Shop foreman Ian Balmforth has been with Boulder for over 15 years, having inherited the job from his father, and he takes a tremendous level of pride in his work. (Click HERE to visit our website for more pictures of the Boulder factory.) It’s actuation feels like the clunk of a Bentley door. As impressive as the chassis and heat sinks are, perhaps the coolest part of each Boulder 3050 is the massive power switch, which features a highly polished paddle machined from stainless steel.
#AUDIO BLOCKS PRICING SERIES#
Once through Boulder’s various CNC machining centers, the amps undergo a series of final finishing operations, ending with bead-blasting and clear-anodizing processes.
Each 3050 heat sink is machined from a 115-pound solid billet of 6061-T1 aluminum alloy. The visit begins in the machine shop, where the exquisitely machined parts that make up a Boulder amplifier come to life. For those with enough power on tap and hefty floors (and the wherewithal to afford a pair), the 3050s arrive with Colorado-mined black granite bases that perfectly match the asymmetrical shape of the amplifiers. And I’m guessing that only a privileged few also have floors stout enough.
“We haven’t sent these out for review because no one has enough AC power in their listening room to accommodate these,” laughs Boulder’s Rich Maez as we tour the factory. Forget the usual audiophile excuses about how a review can’t be written without the product being in your own system, because in this case the Boulder listening room features a pair of Focal Grande Utopia EM speakers, a model I am very familiar with. My wimpy 20-amp dedicated lines are not enough for me to commandeer a pair of these for review, so I go to the mountains of Boulder, Colorado, home of Boulder Amplifiers.
You also need a dedicated 220/240-volt line for each monoblock amplifier. The price tag of awesome is rarely a small one. Each of Boulder’s massive 3050 monoblocks weigh 450 pounds and supply 1500 watts of Class-A power per channel, delivering an experience beyond anything I’ve ever heard. What do you get for a whopping $205,000 dollars? You get real music, provided you have speakers and ancillaries up to the task.
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