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                                Page  6

Warranty Information

This product is warranted for parts and labor from the date we ship it. Check with the factory
authorized distributor in the country you are purchasing this product for specific warranty
information.

Distributors are only required to offer warranty service on Pass products that they have sold.
They are not obligated to offer warranty repair for products purchased from other distributors.
Products purchased from other distributors should be returned to the country of purchase for
warranty repair.

Supersymmetry:  What it is, Where it came from, How it works, Why bother

(theory and philosophy by Pass that you can ignore)

Supersymmetry is the name given to a new type of amplifying circuit, which operates quite
differently than the designs presently appearing in literature and the marketplace.  I have been
designing new amplifiers all my adult life, and patented several of them, but I regard this
particular idea as the most interesting and profound.  The name “supersymmetry” describes
the circuit but is also the name of a theory from the field of particle physics that considers the
ultimate nature of matter and forces in terms of symmetries.

A little history of the development of this idea might help to illuminate the concept.  As far as
I’m concerned, the progress in amplifier design has to do with making amplifiers better while
making them simpler.

Numerous amplifier design techniques have been offered during this century, but the ideas
that have stood the test of time have delivered much better performance in simple ways.  Two
of the best ideas have been negative feedback and push-pull operation.  Negative feedback is
a simple technique, which requires only a couple more parts, arranged simply, but it achieves
dramatic improvements in performance.  Similarly for push-pull operation, a couple more parts
delivers incredibly greater efficiency and improved distortion at high power levels.

The concepts of negative feedback and push-pull operation in amplifiers were old enough in
1970 that some of their limitations were becoming apparent, at least with regard to audio
amplifiers.  In the hands of mediocre designers, feedback was often overused to cover up
design sins elsewhere in the circuit, with the result that the amplifier did not sound very good,
in spite of good distortion measurements.  Push-pull circuits, while allowing high efficiency and
cheap manufacture, did not improve the character of the sound at lower levels, where we do
most of our listening, a deficiency which designers often use feedback to cover up.

It appears that the human sense of hearing is more subtle in some ways than distortion
measurement apparatus, and many audiophiles were dissatisfied with the results of the new
breed of solid state amplifiers appearing in the 60’s and 70’s.  These designs used lots of
feedback to clean up their efficient push-pull circuits.

The innovative designers were beginning to consider some variations of and alternatives to
these tried and mostly true approaches, and some new designs appeared.

Содержание Pass X250

Страница 1: ...Page 1 Pass X250 Owner s Manual ...

Страница 2: ...ing a gain stage an inversely distorted signal Supersymmetry seeks merely to create perfect matching Matched balanced power circuitry typically sees a distortion and noise reduction of about 90 20 dB through a balanced connection without any additional effort The Supersymmetric circuit delivers another 90 reduction so that the X series has about 1 100 of the distortion of a conventionally simple a...

Страница 3: ...ure that the power switch is off down Plug the AC cord into the back of the amplifier and then into the wall Then turn the switch on up The lights in your house will blink when the power supply charges the capacitors On the front panel the Standby LED indicator should be glowing blue indicating that the power is on The Power LED should not be on If the Power LED is on don t get excited just use th...

Страница 4: ...l button so if you want the button to operate leave the rear connection open So much for the most essential information Speaker Interface The X250 is optimized for loads nominally rated at 4 ohms and above You can run the amplifiers into a lower nominal impedance without difficulty and we are not aware of a speaker on the market that presents unusual difficulty with these amplifiers The X amplifie...

Страница 5: ...s each These are used to create the unregulated output stage rails at plus and minus 47 volts at 20 amps All the power transistors in the product are power Mosfets actually Hexfets from International Rectifier and Harris These are hyper matched parts with gate voltages matched to 0 5 and all devices taken from the same lot codes made on the same wafer The speed and noise critical gain devices in t...

Страница 6: ...have been offered during this century but the ideas that have stood the test of time have delivered much better performance in simple ways Two of the best ideas have been negative feedback and push pull operation Negative feedback is a simple technique which requires only a couple more parts arranged simply but it achieves dramatic improvements in performance Similarly for push pull operation a co...

Страница 7: ... much in wasted energy but in the cost of the heavier hardware needed to deliver and dissipate the additional heat One of the important potential advantages of Class A operation is the possibility for simplified circuitry requiring little or no feedback because of the much more linear performance of gain devices biased to a high current By the mid 1970 s the marketplace began to see high end solid...

Страница 8: ...my part led to the Stasis amplifier a simpler if cruder circuit in which the ocean liner could just about make it into port by itself with only minor damage and the tugboat was capable of crossing the Atlantic if not the Pacific Threshold and Nakamichi have sold lots of these amplifiers for the last 19 years or so and so it was pretty successful Yet it was always in the back of my head that there ...

Страница 9: ...I decided to build a state of the art very high power amplifier the X1000 a project not particularly appropriate for the single ended Class A approach believe me you don t want to own an amplifier idling at 3000 watts per channel So I pulled out the files on patent 5 376 899 and took another look Extensive testing of potential circuits revealed that the best topology for the front end of the ampli...

Страница 10: ... can it be represented with operational amplifiers It has two negative inputs and two positive outputs and consists of two matched gain blocks coupled at one central point where the voltage is ideally zero The topology is unique in that at this point the distortion contributed by each half appears out of phase with the signal and we use this to reinforce the desired signal and cancel noise and dis...

Страница 11: ... the two halves of the circuit and lets the balanced output ignore the unwanted components As long as the two halves are matched this performance tends to be frequency independent and does not deteriorate over the audio band With mid level distortion figures on the order of 002 this is very high performance for a single balanced gain stage The following pages include a typical distortion curve of ...

Страница 12: ... Current plus minus 20 amps Input Impedance 22 kohm balanced Damping factor 250 ref 8 ohms nominal Slew rate plus minus 50 V uS Output Noise 300 uV unweighted 20 20 kHz Random noise floor approximately 2 uV Dynamic range 148 dB random noise floor to peak output Balanced CMRR 85 dB 1 kHz input common mode rejection ratio DC offset 100 mv Power Consumption 270 watts idle 1000 watts maximum Temperatu...

Страница 13: ...Page 13 tel 530 367 3690 fax 530 367 2193 ...

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