Hello to all
Here is some info and casual pics on our brand new design, the Pondera (ok, not so new
The Pondera pre-amplifier was one of our early designs, on the very beginning of the company. The first Pondera was designed in 2011 and was demoed at the 2011 Munich show. In my ears this was an incredible sounding design but i decided to put it in the "design freezer" , to re re-lauched at a later stage. I thought that this time, to relauch the design had come, with many differences, but with same technology in it's core, as the original Pondera
.
So what was special with Pondera? The preamp was designed to showcase our proprietary NOIES technology,which by now it was not used in other equipment.
The NOIES stands for Negative Output Impedance Energy Supply.More on this tech later, but a few words:
Any PSU will present a certain amount of "sag" or "surge" when current demands of a certain stage changes.
The Pondera uses a real time modulator in the PSU which modulates the PSU in correlation to the signal, overcompensating the modulation that signal would be imposed on the PSU.It does not use feedback or feedfforward . In a sense, the more current a stage demands, the more current the PSU would try to deliver.
The NOIES circuit is not a regulator design,using feedback to lower or bring close to zero the output impedance of the regulator, but is it a modulator that when "viewed" from the side that is being "fed" (the output stage) it presents negative impedance. So much so , that it contributes to the gain as well as the total power output(modulates the output as well.)
The NOIES tech is IMHO what makes the sound of this tech so special. Measurement wise is probably the best non-feedback/non-degeneration feedback pre out there, but we do not care about that anyway
, great measurements is more a confirmation of the design performance(for reference all harmonics including H2+H3 are at -100db at 0db signal).
Some nice feats of the new Pondera is the use of true dual mono PSU, but also one separate tube and one SS rectified PSU per channel .User can switch even in real time between the SS and tube rectification.Why have both? Some might prefer the zero maintenance of the SS rectification, or preserve the fancy tube rectifiers for critical listening and not for everyday use. Hey some even might prefer the SS rectified sound, who knows. We did it because we can.
More details of the NOIES tech and how it sounds in due time...
Cheers
S
Here is some info and casual pics on our brand new design, the Pondera (ok, not so new
The Pondera pre-amplifier was one of our early designs, on the very beginning of the company. The first Pondera was designed in 2011 and was demoed at the 2011 Munich show. In my ears this was an incredible sounding design but i decided to put it in the "design freezer" , to re re-lauched at a later stage. I thought that this time, to relauch the design had come, with many differences, but with same technology in it's core, as the original Pondera
.
So what was special with Pondera? The preamp was designed to showcase our proprietary NOIES technology,which by now it was not used in other equipment.
The NOIES stands for Negative Output Impedance Energy Supply.More on this tech later, but a few words:
Any PSU will present a certain amount of "sag" or "surge" when current demands of a certain stage changes.
The Pondera uses a real time modulator in the PSU which modulates the PSU in correlation to the signal, overcompensating the modulation that signal would be imposed on the PSU.It does not use feedback or feedfforward . In a sense, the more current a stage demands, the more current the PSU would try to deliver.
The NOIES circuit is not a regulator design,using feedback to lower or bring close to zero the output impedance of the regulator, but is it a modulator that when "viewed" from the side that is being "fed" (the output stage) it presents negative impedance. So much so , that it contributes to the gain as well as the total power output(modulates the output as well.)
The NOIES tech is IMHO what makes the sound of this tech so special. Measurement wise is probably the best non-feedback/non-degeneration feedback pre out there, but we do not care about that anyway
Some nice feats of the new Pondera is the use of true dual mono PSU, but also one separate tube and one SS rectified PSU per channel .User can switch even in real time between the SS and tube rectification.Why have both? Some might prefer the zero maintenance of the SS rectification, or preserve the fancy tube rectifiers for critical listening and not for everyday use. Hey some even might prefer the SS rectified sound, who knows. We did it because we can.
More details of the NOIES tech and how it sounds in due time...
Cheers
S
