Upcoming Technics SP-10R (100th Anniversary Model)

Invictus005:

You are correct in that I have an OLED, cable box..etc all connected to the mains. The solution is that they are connected through multiple Monster power strips. When I want to really listen to my system without compromise, I press the main switch on the Monster power strip with my foot and it does a hard disconnect of those devices from the wall and yes it makes a difference. I'm so used to doing it now as a necessary evil of SMPS's I don't really think about it anymore. 

And yes, I unplug phones or iPads if they are charging before I sit down to do real listening :)

So how do you think Berning manages to build an SMPS that does not offend you?  He's been using such supplies for maybe as much as 20 years or more.  Which is why one can lift his ZOtl amplifiers with one hand. Also, the linear supplies of vintage direct-drive turntables were hardly state of the art even for the time in which they were built, which was before we all got obsessed with power supply quality.  Old school diodes with capacitor filtering into a voltage regulator, was about it.

Hi Lew, Speak with David Berning directly, he is a gentleman and will address with empirical scientific data precisely and succinctly how the patented Berning ZOTL dc coupled, resonant switching power supply vastly differs from your typical commercial switch mode power supplies.  White papers and patents exist #5,612,646, which expound on the topic at length.  To be quite honest, at this level, technical summaries and true comprehension remains challenging for the majority of us to fully understand without an advanced electrical engineering degree.

@audiofun, I too share your concern about SMPS in audio. I have sent my 1200G to time-step audio to get their linear PSU fitted.

Regarding the Berning PSU, I have had few conversations with Berning about it since I have been considering his amp too. My only reservation was the HF noise related to the SMPS he uses. As a gentleman, he clearly said that all PSUs have their compromises. Where SMPS has HF noise, a linear PSU is a lot heavier to build and also needs to be isolated from the rest of the amplification circuitry to prevent interference and thats why needs to be in a separate box for the best implementation. He has done that all and doesn't feel it is worth the effort. But he does say that SMPS has that HF hash which may be minimised but still there. His earlier ZOTL designs had a transformer at the output which filters out all the noise upto 250khz. Now he uses a transformer which filters out noise upto 500khz. So this noise issue it real and there. It may not bother everyone as not everyone is equally sensitive to HF noise. With an SMPS based equipment the location also matters a lot because SMPS is supposedly very sensitive to RFI/EMI. RFI and EMI also contributes to the electronic hash in the sound. All said and done I am not yet convinced that SMPS is a musical compromise :-).