The holy grail of audio industry is the solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem in amplifier design: the transformerless amplifier (OTL). Fortunately, Einstein Audio Components has something to say about that problem. With 80 W/12 Ohm.
Article continues below
The transformerless circuit concept is good because it allows absolute precision and speed and yet so difficult to execute, because it is so complex and expensive in practical applications. This circuit provides the most brilliant results. But it is complicated and complex and very rarely found in home audio amplifiers. Having gained 12 years of experience designing these extremely complex and expensive Output TransformerLess (OTL) tube amplifiers, Einstein Audio completely revised and significantly improved the technology.
An OTL amplifier has, at its core advantage when compared to a conventional tube amplifier with output transformers, the ability to connect a loudspeaker directly to the output tubes. The sound quality limiting output transformer does not interfere with the circuit. Frequency response, bandwidth, and phase linearity are in true OTL principle far superior and thus the typical Einstein sound is achieved via company's design philosophy of offering ultra-fast, high bandwidth, linear phase, resulting in unsurpassed sound quality.
Without the output transformer in the signal path, the amplifier controls the loudspeaker with absolute authority. Enter The Silver Bullet OTL Monoamplifier. The original concept of The Final Cut OTL amplifier has been carefully preserved. The damping factor of The Silver Bullet is at a minimum a factor 5 or higher compared to a conventional tube amplifier or even in other OTL realized concepts. The only real disadvantage lies in its incredibly complex circuit which results in very expensive manufacturing techniques.
The Silver Bullet offers a fully symmetrical circuit design for the best possible signal to noise ratio. Even numbered distortions, which have adverse affects on sound quality, are not part of this type of circuit and the signal remains pure and free from any such distortion interference. These are the same principles as with their other audio components, The Preamp and The Source. True to the concept of a wire with gain coupled with the shortest signal paths, the amplifier stages are reduced to only the most necessary. ■