Since the interest in the brand new Trinity SRL Silver Reference mono power amplifiers was enormous, I asked Dietmar Bräuer to explain in more detail what happens under the cabinet of these amplifiers. A photo showing how clean the interior looks.
The enclosure comes from Trinity milling company completely mounted and I just have to remove the top half-shell and add my electronic.
You can assemble and disassemble all the modules with just a screwdriver. All modules are pre-assembled and tested by Bräuer. By the way, Bräuer has his own automatic SMT assembly line with a Vapor phase soldering System, which can be used for PCBs up to 400mm in length.
You can see in the picture the active current probe TCP2020 (50MHz, 20A & 100Apeak pulse) clipped on the wire to the load and connected to the R&S RTE 1104 oscilloscope (1GHz, 5Gs) which shows the current into the load.
Bräuer had to use a current probe to be sure that we really drive the current into the load since he could not see any difference between no load and 4Ohm at 200W on my audio analyzer, so his first expectation was that the load is broken and no current flows out of the Amp.
After connecting the current probe Bräuer was really surprised that such high currents flow, but the distortions did not change between no load and full load. The second test was just to check the temperature of the heatsink on which the load resistors are mounted.
“From then on it was clear that I had built the almost perfect amplifier right away and that no further development work was necessary.”
In other words, the first assembled circuit board was immediately installed in the first amplifier. The amplifier modules in the background have shown that he can duplicate this outstanding performance easily.
“This power amp has better values under full load condition, than the most preamps in the market driving a much smaller signal into almost no load.”
In Bräuer’s view, this is a truly load-independent amplifier, because the sound-relevant measuring values do not change via the load to be driven.
The power amp module is only connected by these green, white and red cables to the ultra-low drop and ultra-low noise linear voltage regulator and on the other side to the loudspeaker connector.
These 4 linear voltage regulators can drive more than 20A each with a voltage drop of less than 200mV. These linear voltage regulators remove the switching noise from the SMPS unit and decouple the SMPS modules from the subsequent electronics.
In the front, you see 4 x 400W state-of-the-art SMPS modules. Overall we have a 1600W power supply inside. That is the reason why I use two power entry filter modules.
Side Note: “SMPS has of course a switching noise on the output, but the big advantage is they have already a regulated output voltage and this voltage is stable from 85Vac to 265Vac and almost independent from the load.
If you use a much cheaper transformer solution any variation on the input voltage appears also on the output voltage and such a transformer creates a huge magnetic field if not shielded properly.
The load regulation of the used SMPS unit is in a range of 50mV between no load and 40A. If you want such an extremely low “ripple” from a transformer-based design you need a 7.000.000µF capacitor behind the rectifier!!!!!”