Tru Technologies Steel S44

An angular and sharp-edged item, care must be taken in handling as the casing could easily cause minor scrapes and scratches. Brushed Steel sheet case looks very purposeful and the internal finned Aluminium heatsink is also ridged along its length offering bigger surface area for its cooling by the large centrally mounted fan. No high level input, the device is relatively simple in features offering a standard phone-jack bass control port and a bass boost that can be switched in to offer up to an extra 12dB at the standard 45Hz. One of very few products actually made in the USA, as the evangelical UK distributor is keen to point out. Using high quality parts within, the product is described as a ‘Rare Breed’. Not a mainstream brand but one aimed squarely at the same high end buyer as the JL Audio 300/4v2, this has a raw edge to it in looks that seem to say ‘enthusiast product’. It has a slight air of a mad-technician being in charge who simply wants to encase it in a function-breeding-form manner. The almost ugly looks are in fact an indication of purposefulness, reminding the reviewer of no-cosmetic-frills-whatsoever professional studio equipment. The potentiometers do not line up well with their case holes on my example. All case fixings are cross head, which seems a shameful hap’orth of tar sort of a saving and Allen-headed fixings would have made it look more ‘engineeringy’ few a very few cents extra. – Class AB Dual stereo/mono design. (discrete circuitry for each pair of channels.)
– 4 x 65w RMS @ 4 Ohms- 4 x 100w RMS @ 2 Ohms
– 2 x 200w RMS @ 4 Ohms bridged (dual mono)
– Brushed Steel casing with internal ridged finned heatsink and large centrally-mounted cooling fan
– 4Ga. power terminals with cross headed grub screw connection
– 4Ch RCA input, no high level input
– 12dB per Octave high/low pass crossovers 35Hz to 350Hz
– Bass Boost to channels C & D only: 0-12dB @ 45Hz
– Optional remote bass gain knob
– Input sensitivity: 350mV to 9.5V
– Stereo & bridged operation
– Frequency response 10Hz to 30kHz +/-0.5dB
– Signal to Noise Ratio >100dB
– Channel separation not quoted
– Fuse Rating 30A x 2
– Power and protection Status LEDs
– HxWxD(mm) 64 x 340 x 238mm
Review by Adam Rayner
Tru Technologies are your actual Suffolk Black Pig. They are the Muckle Coo (highland cattle) they are the Suffolk Punch heavy horse. They are true Rare Breeds. Bred in small quantities for love of their particular qualities by the passionate and sold by the evangelical. So far so Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstallthingummy. But this is electronics. Tru are not just makers of amplifiers’ louder bits, they are serious geeks when it comes to purity of signal input and preamplification. Some of their madder-end stuff comes with a trio of options for the preamplifier section. Either no card in the amplifier at all and simply use one of their extremely highly specified line driver boxes to feed the amp, or else have their main preamp board, or pay a fat premium more for a best-we-can-make preamp board for the truly infected audiophile.
As such, I did eventually work out that the level of throughput of the Tru Technologies Steel 44 was limited by my test rig. I struggled to drive it hard enough because as you can see from the specification, it is rated to be able to cope with a whopping 9 Volts of signal level. And of course if you have any sense and are getting into a Tru Tech install, you aughta listen to your expert and invest in a bitching line driver as well. Which isn’t to say I wasn’t impressed by the Tru Tech Steel 44, I was. I just kind of felt that I hadn’t put high enough octane fuel in the tank. All that said the amp made a great big sound, both pure and fast. You can hear and feel a bigger rise time to the fronts of beats and stuff like those oh so revealing percussive tinkles and guitar string winding rub-noises. Jack Johnson or Basement Jaxx alike, this amp gave good feel and emotional impact. It has that real high end speed that you need to own quite painfully expensive loudspeakers to really appreciate. The reference Morel Supremo 6 components in the test rig are £1,400 worth and they sang on this amp. Cranked up, the sound was still a tiny bit US-tough rather than British-sweet audiophillia in overall feel. But that’s an outer-limits sort of judgement as the product is irrefutably upmarket in performance.
Unfortunately, the rawness of look of the casing carries through to the slight raw edge to the construction. Not being made on a huge single machine made by Siemens but rather by a skilled workforce, the little touches like controls lining up nicely with the holes they are meant to kind of let it down a bit by not doing so. The human eye can judge concentricity of circle so well, it can be used in rifle target range shooting to aim a tiny .22 bullet accurately by its own width at 25 metres, without a lens being involved. If a knob isn’t quite concentric in its hole, it shows. Also, the RCA sockets used were found to be a bit skinny by the JL Audio cables I use, and they did fit nicely on other stuff in eighteen amplifiers in all, so perhaps there’s a micron or two of an issue here. make sure the RCA cords you want to use mate well. It’s easy to do, just try plugging one in.
The crossovers are similar in overall performance to those found on the Pioneer PRS D420 but I couldn’t get the bass boost to be audible, which means it’s either too subtle for my big old mega-price ovals to play well (unlikely) or that the bass boost wasn’t actually working. I reckon that I would use the optional remote bass gain knob-on-a-wire you can get to adjust the overall level of this wrinkle. It might even be that you need a remote box to make this control active and yet use it to set the overall amount of bass gain that your knobber is attenuating. As of course no mere knob in a box could amplify or increase the bass on it’s own. It’s like airbrakes – you set your bass to maximum, turn it down with the knob to ‘normal’ for your sicky puppy self and then simply let more out by ‘turning it up’ with the knob – aaaah!
So I stopped messing with the crossovers and ran it full range as I suspect pretty much all Tru Technologies users will, favouring high end external crossovery – usually within the DSP of a top end headunit – over even the best built-in jobs. I enjoyed the output for a bit then gave the AudioControl SA-3055’s SPL section a slapping with full deflection undistorted audio and registered a slightly lower than some in the group’s 124.8dB on the windowsill behind my bonce.
So high end audio but get the set for full effect is what I’d recommend and don’t worry too much about the occasional built-in-the-shed looking bit, it won’t affect how well they sound!
Overall 7.6
Sound Quality 8
Power Output 8
Features 7
Build Quality 8
Value For Money 7