CLEAN POWER
STRATEGIES
IEC AC mains filtering card
- click to enlarge
Main PSU board - click to enlarge
150 Henry choke - click to enlarge
London Power's musical instrument amplifiers and accessory products have always been very low noise, especially when compared to traditional tube amp designs. There is no reason that a tube amp should be significantly noisier than a solid-state amp, or that a guitar amp should be noisier than other professional equipment. After all, we wrote the book on low-noise techniques for guitar amps.
Three approaches go into achieving low-noise performance: protecting the circuit from external noise; designing the circuit itself for lowest noise contamination of the signal; and physically assembling the circuit in the correct "low-noise" fashion.
Noise is kept out of the amplifier by filtering the incoming AC mains power. Instrument inputs and effects returns are also carefully designed to block out-of-band frequencies which constitute noise.
Brute-force filtering along with subtler techniques assure that DC voltages fed to the circuits is extremely clean. Our Galactic Ground separates signals from each other, allowing fantastic note articulation.
Our various amps and accessories use similar techniques, along with "tried and true" traditional methods. STUDIO-10 has three chokes filtering the plate supply, screen supply and preamp supply. This has not been done in a production amplifier since the 1930s.
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