Technical excellence

The design is fully balanced  ensuring a very a very low noise floor

High voltage power supply rails for the low-level signal stages and a balanced output stage ensure a very wide dynamic range, which combined with the design’s very wide bandwidth provides exceptional transparency and resolution.

The heart of an amplifier is the power supply, so great care was taken with the design to ensure that it would be able to provide the audio sections with a source of power that was as stable and noise free as possible.

The low-level signal section, power amplifier stage and control section all have their own independent toroidal power transformers. These were chosen for their low external magnetic fields. To minimise the effects of stray magnetic fields, all three transformers are housed in their own screened enclosures.

The amplifier’s incoming mains power is not routed through the power switch, as these can have a detrimental effect on the sound.

This is especially so with very high-power amplifiers. Instead, this switch supplies power to the standby circuit and when the front panel On button is pressed, this turns on a high current relay which carries the mains power.

When a large power supply is connected to the mains supply, the initial in-rush current can be high enough to trip circuit breakers or blow fuses. To prevent this, a 4-stage soft start circuit allows the power supply to “slowly” charge before it is switched out of the circuit. This also reduces the stress on the power relay.

High quality power supply capacitors are used with additional decoupling capacitors located physically as close as possible to where they are needed in the circuit.

Great care was also taken with the internal grounding to prevent the introduction of noise.

As a further noise reduction measure, a front panel ground lift switch allows the amplifier’s signal ground to be disconnected from the chassis safety ground and is useful in eliminating hum when this is caused by a ground loop. This is where there is more than one ground connection between two pieces of audio equipment, thus forming a loop. This can act as a single turn coil and stray magnetic fields from nearby equipment and/or power cables can induce a mains frequency current in this loop, which then produces a hum that is heard from the loudspeakers. If this is the cause of hum in a system, using the ground lift switch to break this loop will stop the hum.