New phono stage from SOTA

The Sota web site is being updated to allow for EU (and UK) purchases of the Pyxi.

How did I determine "no added colorations?’. Well, I didn’t that was SoTa’s conclusion.

I just followed a philosophy which amounts to,

1. Flat RIAA- variations over the audio band below the subjective threshold.

2.Extremely high power supply rejection, and extremely low power supply/ground interaction between stages.

3. Distortion which is below the acoustic threshold (-110dB FS) measured whatever way you choose to do it.

There are other aspects, but you get the gist, hence the designed to be explicitly neutral.

Finally in subjective testing. It actually sounds neutral, with a very high degree of clarity.

Oh. The Sota Acrux will be a bigger box with more functions (knobs and buttons) and even better specs and capabilities- all for 8x the price.

@wynpalmer4 Thank you for the clarification. Would the unit benefit from a larger 14VAC supply?

The larger unit does not use the 14v wall wart. It, presently, uses a very different supply.

The Pyxi WILL NOT BENEFIT FROM A CHANGE IN THE WALL WART!!!

The 240v version uses a 15v wall wart due to availability issues. 

Using a 15v wall wart in the US version could compromise the reliabilty. Even using a different 14v unit could do the same.

The filtering/regulation circuitry was carefully designed for the 14v wall wart that was used.

One other thing, I am well aware of the rather, how shall we say it, questionable (or at least questioned) results concerning the ultrasonic sensitivities of human hearing.

In any case what makes you so certain that those very sensitivities were not taken into consideration in the Pyxi etc. design?

In fact, the design is explicitly structured to ensure ultra-low distortion even for ultrasonic frequencies, and my test/evaluation methodology included signals up to 48khz (96kHz FS/2). Although the Pyxi does not have the extreme non-sensitivity that the Acrux has (read the paper, the multi tone tests which exceed the audio band say it all), it’s pretty darn good.

The Pyxi is not as good as I wanted it to be. SoTa had certain low cost goals that caused compromises to be taken. But it’s pretty darn good.