LD91 Mono Max with P:USH Power - Preview
Our universe became a little disordered last year when we introduced the single chassis LD dual mono. Due to escalating costs the 8 year old LD monoblock was not sustainable as a product on two counts: 1. cost of materials and manufacturing had almost tripled since the original Billie was offered for $700 (including all the upgrades we progressively built into the kit) and 2. shipping overseas by Fedex had doubled from <$200USD originally to >$400USD by 2009 (also due to the extra weight of all the upgrades and enhancements).
The LD dual mono chassis gave us an opportunity to keep a sane selling price and also to forever dump the poison of electrolytics in the power supply and thus offer the one and only all film cap SET amplifier. This is where our universe became disarranged - the single chassis LD sounded better than the monoblocks. I guess not a surprise since the single chassis LD has everything the monoblocks had except minus one power transformer but plus 200uf of film caps. Raise the bar and that's what happens.
In the meantime we've developed our own filament supplies and FCUPS (film cap universal power supply) which raises the bar again.
I still had in mind to show some respect to the establishment.
Here's a preview of what is coming: LD in Projekt chassis with FCUPS and filament supply standard. The extra cost of the FCUPS will be covered in part by the lower shipping cost due to the weight saved by not having huge chokes and caps. Also the added performance of the FCUPS is not subtle and is too good to not have.
The discerning eye will notice this is our 91 circuit with Level 3 parts. This will be our standard for this LD monoblock. I will also do a version without the tantalums/teflon caps and some other expensive bits, but it will still be a 91. I fact, to maintain current naming convention and avoid confusion with previous circuits I'll probably name that one the Level 3 and this one the LD Mono Max.
I'll also sell an 'open kit' version which will include all the basic infrastructure, chassis, transformers etc, for those that want to build their own way.
So what's this P:USH Power business?
Power for Ultimate Signal Headroom! Because the FCUPS with it's huge store of inductive energy and in virtual battery mode is in a totally different league than banks of caps, resistors and even big chokes in their little puddle of inductance. You really need to hear it - inductive energy store is totally better than capacitive energy. Like Iron Man beats Chickenman.
So that the LD91 Mono Max with P:USH Power.
More to come.
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