Dan D'Agostino founded Krell in 1980 and served as its chief engineer until 2009. In 2011 he started again under his own name, in Cave Creek, Arizona, and Dan D'Agostino Master Audio Systems is marking its fifteenth year with the Momentum Z. Few designers get a second act. Fewer still use it to build the amplifiers they would have built the first time.
The copper is the first thing people notice. Where the industry uses aluminum heat sinks, D'Agostino machines them from solid copper — nearly twice the thermal conductivity — in an elliptical geometry that has become the visual signature of the brand. Each Momentum Z heat sink is five-axis machined from a single forty-two-pound slab of copper billet. Chassis are milled from solid aluminum with no visible fasteners, and every amplifier carries an analog meter modeled on Swiss watchmaking.
Underneath the jewelry is serious engineering. The flagship Relentless Epic 1600 delivers 1,600 watts into eight ohms and doubles down twice, weighs 570 pounds, and uses 112 output transistors, each individually measured and matched for gain linearity. Its output stage is truly balanced rather than bridged, running a single front end on current-mirror circuitry so that distortion artifacts cancel, with no global negative feedback anywhere. The range descends through Momentum to the Pendulum integrated — the company's own stated gateway.
One policy deserves attention if you are buying at this level: the Epic 1600 uses the same chassis as the original Relentless, which means existing owners can be upgraded rather than replaced. The generational naming across the line — MxV, C2Z, Epic — reflects that approach.
Amplification at this level is bought with the loudspeaker in mind — D'Agostino drives Wilson Audio in rooms all over the world, and hearing that pairing is worth arranging an audition for.
