Aries Cerat writes: “Here is some info and casual pics on our brand new (ok, not so new) design, the Pondera. The Pondera pre-amplifier was one of our early designs, at the very beginning of the company.
The first Pondera was designed in 2011 and was demoed in the 2011 Munich show. In my ears, this was an incredible-sounding design but I decided to put it in the “design freezer”, to be relaunched in the future. I think it was time, to relaunch the design, with many differences, but with the same core tech as the original.
So what was special with Pondera? The preamp was designed to showcase our NOIES technology, which by now 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 the 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 feedforward. In a sense, the more current a stage demands, the more current the PSU would try to deliver.
The NOIES tech is IMHO what makes the sound of this tech so special. Measurement-wise, it is probably the best non-feedback pre out there, but we do not care about that anyway.
One nice feature of the new Pondera is the use of a true dual mono PSU, but also one separate tube and one SS rectified PSU per channel. Users 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.”