Hyperbole? Hardly. You see, the 1160’s new chassis has been styled to highlight Boulder’s local geography.

Take a gander at the new amp’s layered front facia and sure enough, assuming you’re a local you’ll be delighted to find the panel design is actually a reproduction of the topographical map of Flagstaff Mountain that is located directly west of Boulder, Colorado.

We love that.

Elsewhere the 1160 that is the successor to the highly rated 1060 model, is the first product in the new 1100 series of model that are scheduled to be unveiled soon.

Part of Boulder’s mid-tier ranges, the 1160 is no poverty pack and is fairly bristling with edgy new technology and according to Boulder, delivers exceptional performance from its modest size.

Said to be far ahead sonically of anything in the previous 1000 series, the 1160 benefits sonically from advances in thermal management, ground paths, noise floor and circuit layout and housekeeping.

Boulder has upped the amount of surface-mount technology that is made on Boulder’s own surface-mounting manufacturing machines and ovens. This delivers less noise radiation, propagation delay, parasitic capacitance and the elimination of lead inductance in affected circuits.

New also for the 1160 is a 64-bit, multi-core ARM processor for all supervisory functions including management of protection circuits, AC line monitoring, power, thermal detection, error notification ands HTML-or IP-based external control.

This ARM processor enables the use of Boulder Net, an IP-based unit-to-unit detection, system layout and communication architecture available to external control systems such as Savant or Crestron and application based system controls.

For any unit that’s network connected, an HTML setup and control page is available by simply logging into the amp’s IP address via a browser.

The 1160’s gain stages are unique to Boulder and built to the brand’s 983 design. 983 gain stages are surface mounted mechanical designs with board-mounted heat sinks that provide the initial 20 dB of gain in a multi-stage design yielding exceptionally wide bandwidth. They combine discrete and monolithic design with a high-current output.

Inside the 1`160 nestle 56 bi-polar output devices (28 per channel), 48 filter caps and 2 toroidal power transformers that generate up to 300 watts per channel into any load.

Take it as given the 1160 has massive current swings and the wellies to drive any loudspeaker to realistic audio levels.

The Boulder 1160 Stereo Amplifier will be available in Australia next week for $42,500 RRP.