Music like you remember it
About Power Supplies
A brief note on our philosophy of power supplies is instructive: the goal of power purity is really about impedance. ALL other properties of quality power, current, voltage, filtration, noise etc. are dictated by the supply’s impedance.
Impedance is measured in ohms. The lower, the better.
A power supply sends voltage to a load. If you think about it, if the supply has 0 ohms, no noise, distortion, crosstalk, literally nothing can develop to interfere with pure power as no energy, signal or noise can exist across nothing. 0 ohms means ONLY DC power exists and nothing else. Perfection.
So the goal of all power supplies is to reach 0 ohms impedance, in which case if the supply has 0 ohms, it not only has zero coloration, it also has zero reactions to the load/s (damping), zero noise, etc.
This is because you cannot develop noise, RF, or fluctuations of any kind over 0 ohms.
0 ohms means it has no influence on the signal it powers. It’s sonically non-existent. The goal of all power supply is simply to not alter the signal in any manner and just provide pure DC power.
That said, 0 ohm supplies do not exist either!
So instead we try to get the impedance as low as possible through a combination of both digital supplies and subsequent regeneration through a linear supply.
To that end, their approach of using transformers is debatable. The virtue of using transformers and the subsequent circuitry is it has no digital oscillations present. Digital supplies have these oscillations which manifest as noise.
Our Approach to Power Supplies
Transformers do not have this noise but they RAISE the impedance. GREATLY. Digital supplies impedance are 1000-fold lower than transformer-based supplies.
Transformer-based supplies can be deceptive looking as well. They are extremely inefficient such that they appear physically larger. This does not translate into them being a larger power supply though. They simply must be huge to do the same thing.
The two parameters that define the quality of any power supply are impedance and Joules. Joules are the energy a power supply is capable of delivering and impedance as above, tells you how much interference from the load and external forces it will suffer.
Joules can (very) roughly be defined by the wattage. If the wattage is high enough for even the most extreme dynamic, it won’t improve by increasing it. Impedance as above, improves as you approach 0 so it can never be low enough. Only 0 ohms has zero coloration.
So having enough Joules is easy. It simply has to have enough voltage and amperage. So the real issue with power is impedance and striving towards 0.
A transformer-based supply inherently has about 1000X the impedance of a digital supply. This may not be overcome without the transformer-based supply being gigantic.
So if nothing else, the impedance superiority of a digital supply as the source is really a given. Where the debate enters is the digital supply oscillators pumping noise into the power as with a transformer-based supply, these are not present.
The reason we feel this is far less of an issue than the impedance rise of transformers is 100% of this noise is in the radio frequency area. These cannot pass through even a single inductor. A classic 3-part capacitor-inductor-capacitor filter (known as a 2nd order-pi filter) drops this RF noise about 140dB.
That’s 10dB (-3X) to 20dB (-10X) quieter than the quietest digital audio signal. So it’s noise is reduced some 3X to 10X below what any digital audio system can even reproduce.WE feel our supplies achieve the optimal combination of low impedance with both low noise and circuitry protection not afforded by a linear supply standing on its own.