John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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Possibly noteworthy: Sutherland Engineering's "MCX" moving coil preamplifier uses a switch mode power supply, visible on the left of the photo.

Perhaps if an SMPS can work well in a moving coil preamplifier, with its incredibly low noise floor, an SMPS can work well in other types of audio gear as well.

The MCX also takes "Dual Mono Construction" to the extreme: two chassis, two power supplies, and two AC mains power cords (!)

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Possibly noteworthy: Sutherland Engineering's "MCX" moving coil preamplifier uses a switch mode power supply, visible on the left of the photo.

Perhaps if an SMPS can work well in a moving coil preamplifier, with its incredibly low noise floor, an SMPS can work well in other types of audio gear as well.

The MCX also takes "Dual Mono Construction" to the extreme: two chassis, two power supplies, and two AC mains power cords (!)

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It uses a step up transformer. That is a crutch to not have to deal with PSU noise, amongst other things. I'd like to see the same SMPS used to power some transistors directly tied to the MC cart. Some noise gremlins would likely see the light of day.
 
It uses a step up transformer. That is a crutch to not have to deal with PSU noise, amongst other things. I'd like to see the same SMPS used to power some transistors directly tied to the MC cart. Some noise gremlins would likely see the light of day.

SMPS can be filtered very effectively. Murata and other companies have entire product lines with ferrites, common-mode chokes, 3 terminal capacitors, etc. for this purpose.
 
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It's not that they are poor on paper, but Samxon is known to have been a brand that had huge failure rates on cheap PC motherboards and some TVs a number of years back. They are a low end supplier. Seeing them doesn't give me a good feeling about the rest of the components in the design.
The rash of failures a good few years ago was caused by a supplier letting some dud documents get stolen, that had an incorrect electrolyte specified, that faulty recipy was then shared around by several companies, and a short while after they were made they all started failing...
 
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The rash of failures a good few years ago was caused by a supplier letting some dud documents get stolen, that had an incorrect electrolyte specified, that faulty recipy was then shared around by several companies, and a short while after they were made they all started failing...

Audio Research lost all their amps with failed ps electro-capacitors, also.


here is what you can do with EQ for headphones.... they needed EQ'ing where M2 doesnt.

software indicates speakers being tested but isnt true.. headphones.


HPA EQ.JPG



THx-RNMarsh
 
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