PLiXiR Power Concept – Plixir Power

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Intro
Puretone
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PureTone
High definition for your ears

From concept to design, the goal for our Plixir products has been clear: the accurate and natural reproduction of PureTone.

A violin should sound like a violin, the magical interaction between wood and string.

A trumpet exhibiting the glorious metallic tones of the brass from which it is crafted.

Whether it’s a bright and brassy musical passage, or the sharp tones characteristic of a vocal singer, PureTone accurately and unbiasedly reproduces all the nuances in timbre – nothing more, nothing less.

PureTone is all about going back to the fundamentals of music – when music starts to convey its meaning and stir our soul, so that we begin to understand and emote with the music, no matter the system resolution. And without artificial sweeteners to smoothen and colour the sound.

This is our goal, the pursuit of Pure Tone.

Problem

Solution

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BAC Power Conditioning

But first, some theory. Power conditioning and system grounding profoundly affect sound reproduction, yet are poorly understood.

What we hear from our hifi system is the conversion of energy from the AC mains to the DC power supply of your equipment, which it then draws upon to amplify the music signal.

Fig 1A. Ideal World

Ideal World

Under ideal conditions, AC power drawn from the mains supply is a smooth, sinusoidal wave. Following this, the “perfect” AC/DC converter in your equipment will output flat DC voltages.

Fig 1b. Actual Situation

Actual Situation

In reality, AC mains is noisy, and this noise will leak into the DC power supply and subsequently, into the audio signal that you hear. In conventional electronic circuit design, steps are taken to reduce this noise, but it remains insidious and will find its way into your system.

System Grounding

This is often confused with the safety earth, which is different and is meant to protect you from electric shocks in case of equipment failure.

System grounding, instead, provides the zero reference voltage level for all signal and power voltage in the hifi system.

Fig 2A. Ideal World

Ideal World

For the best sound, the two are electrically separated, with the signal ground generated from the AC/DC converter, and the equipment casing connected to safety earth. This is because noise levels in the Earth will directly affect the system’s ground reference voltage.

Fig 2b. Actual Situation

Actual Situation

However, in the real world, for cost and/or expediency reasons, for example to pass EMI/EMC regulations, the safety earth and signal ground are electrically connected. This causes earth noise to leak into signal ground and high frequency EMI/EMC noise to leak into Earth.

In this way, noise levels in the Earth are mashed together in a complex web in a modern day hifi system, creating noise loops that affect the sound quality of the system in a big way. This is why grounding and earthing products are becoming more and more important.

Plixir Balanced AC Power Conditioners

Because power and grounding have such a profound influence on sound, we are determined to solve the issues of power delivery and grounding of the equipment in a natural and organic manner in accordance to our Pure Tone philosophy.

Our range of Plixir Balanced AC power conditioners provide fundamental grounding solution to your system while naturally lowering down the system noise floor to allow even more harmonics to come forth, without sacrificing dynamics. Most importantly the tonal structure will be intact and improved, not shifted.

Balanced Transformer Design

Our solution employs a balanced transformer design to solve all these power issues naturally and elegantly. Mains AC noise is reduced by the isolating nature of the transformer, enhanced by the balanced design, which increases the common mode noise rejection. At the same time, the balanced design elegantly places its output’s live and neutral voltage at equal and opposite potential to the earth. Thus the earth now becomes a true null point and equipment powered with it will contribute very little leakage current and noise to the Earth, from their power supply sources. And as we mentioned earlier, safety Earth and system ground are now inter-related, this also means less system ground pollution from the power supply side. Thus the balanced winding nature of the transformer is the key.

Fig 2a. Traditional

Fig 2b. With PLiXiR

Power Delivery

In traditional non-balanced power delivery, noise from equipment and mains leak to earth, polluting every chain in the system.

In Plixir Balanced delivery, noise from live and neutral are out of phase to each other and cancels off at the Earth point.

Fig 3a. Traditional

Fig 3b. With PLiXiR

Transformer

It is not easy to wind a truly balanced power transformer however. At Plixir we are happy to work with Noratel, the premier audio transformer manufacturer. Besides being truly bifilar and balanced in design across all our range and models, Noratel’s transformers also have special, unique design features which enhances noise rejection and also current delivery into load to gain better dynamics and transient attack.

We spec our design to only have one set of winding per transformer. We do not cater for multi-voltages (for example, cater for 120Vac USA model and 230Vac HK model) in one transformer. Often this method is used to save cost, so that one can use a single model for all variants and thus enjoys better economy of scale. However, this way of design unnecessarily complicates the transformer and introduces noise to the system. Our spec thus is performance first.

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The Problem

Live

Neutral

Conventional Power Cable Design x-section

Conventional hifi power cable design (twisted three wire, Live, Neutral, Earth and their geometrical permutations) are actually singled-ended in their power transmission design. While they work, they are not able to fully make use of the balanced power output from balanced conditioners to maintain the common mode noise reduction all the way to your equipment. The specific benefits of balanced power are lost at the output of the power conditioner (akin to single ended cable plugged into a balanced signal output).

The safety earth conductor in a conventional hifi power cable is always subjected to field and noise interferences from its neighbouring live and neutral wiring, due to the uneven field it is exposed to. This results in noise generated within the power cable, polluting the earth cable and less than optimal grounding conditions for your equipment.

Designed To Provide High Current Balanced Power Delivery.

Our Signature BPC is specifically designed to provide high current balanced power delivery. The geometry of the high current carrying wire within power cable is optimised for high current delivery in balance mode. Exceptional efforts are spent to make sure the live and neutral conductors are placed in the correct geometry throughout the cable, enabling the common mode noise rejection of balanced power cable be maintained throughout the cable.

Optimised System Grounding We use the excellent Furutech power connectors whose special design maintains the balanced connection right up to the power pin of the connector. Optimum copper conductor to connector is achieved, enabling the lowest contact impedance and providing instantaneous high current delivery.

True Clean Earth Performance The earth conductor is elegantly situated within the null field area of the cable, a location where the fields of the live and neutral naturally cancel out each other. This unique property is only achievable with a balanced design. In this way, the earth sits in a noise free area of the cable and you can enjoy true clean earth performance. The Signature BPC is also protected from external noise influences with a dual noise shield of copper foil and ofc copper braid.

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The Problem

DC power supplies are traditionally SMPS-based (switched mode power supply) due to cost reasons: SMPS are cheaper, lighter to ship and accept a wide range of mains AC voltage.

Fig 7A. Typical DC Power Supply Design

Power Supply Design

Aftermarket linear DC power supplies aim to replace these for improved performance, but 99 per cent of conventional linear DC power supply design on the market suffer flaws:

Isolation of noise from the load to the mains AC is often not considered. This can potentially pollute the AC mains and from there, to pollute your other equipment too.
Traditional diode bridge noise injection to the signal ground is not taken into account at all. The higher the current delivered by the DC power supply, the bigger amount of noise will be injected to the system ground.

Designed To Provide Excellent Noise Specs and Safety.

Fig 7B. PLiXiR Elite BDC Power Supply

3-Stage Power Supply

Our range of DC power supplies, besides delivering excellent noise specs and safety, have taken the above points into consideration into our design. Some of our unique design aspects include:

A two-stage voltage regulation design consisting of a very low noise, open-loop design discrete transistor class-A driver pre-regulator first stage and a close-loop feedback regulator second stage. The first stage filters the bulk of the noise and takes away the heat from the second stage voltage regulator. The two- stage regulation design as a “gate” to prevent the downstream noise from traversing back to the AC power mains. It eliminates all types of noise downstream to your equipment and prevents pollution upstream to the AC mains. We would like to call this method as the brawn and the brain method. The pre- regulation stage (the brawn) handles most of these issues and isolate the actual regulator stage (the brain) from these ill artefacts. Free of these influences, the actual voltage regulator will be able to perform optimally in terms of noise, slew rate and output impedance, under all rated load conditions.
For the Elite balanced DC power supply, we further improved their performance with a Balanced design. With this design, there are no signal ground noise injection by rectifier diodes and elimination of ground loop problems. Also switching noise contributions from AC-DC rectification diodes are also reduced by half, compared to conventional design. The downside is the customised transformer will need to be doubled in size compared to a conventional design size to deliver the same power. The weight and size of the linear power supply will increase. We feel the benefits more than outweigh the issues involved.

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