The Pangea Audio P-100's designer, Peter Madnick, has designed an amazing range of audio products, from the inexpensive Audio Alchemy DACs and preamps, to the astronomically expensive Constellation Audio products. We contacted Peter about his new P-100 power supply.
"What gave you the idea for this new product?"
"I heard intriguing things about the performance of the DACMagic and that Cambridge Audio had sold more than 40,000 units. I thought there might be a market opportunity for a device to improve the sound. One look and I knew I could design a far better power supply than the one supplied by the manufacturer. After all, I've been designing audio power supplies for more than twenty-five years."
"How is the P-100 better?"
"Without giving away too many secrets, let me just say that I used better filtering, regulation and also the P-100 has much lower output impedance. All this dramatically cleans up the power flowing to the DAC. Audio circuits always sound better when they are fed ultra-clean power."
"What was the trickiest part of making the P-100?"
"Finding the right transformer was the hard part. We tested many before we found one that exceeded our specs for both electrical and mechanical noise."
"How did the P-100 evolve to also work with the Musical Fidelity V-DAC?"
"After discovering that P-100 made a substantial improvement in the sound of the DACMagic, I wondered what else we could mate it with. Musical Fidelity was selling thousands of V-DACs, so I added additional taps to the transformer and, presto, I had a marvelous V-DAC upgrade, too. We supply cables with the P-100 so the customer can use it with either DAC – or any of the Musical Fidelity V-Series components."
"What does it mean when you say that the P-100 is a 'regulated' power supply?"
"Regulated power supplies contain ICs which limit their output voltage to a precise value despite the incoming voltage, thus making them stable regardless of drifts in the incoming AC line voltage. In the case of the P-100 these regulators are linear devices instead of digital, thus reducing the amount of high frequency noise coming along with the regulated DC voltage."
"Does the transformer act as a power line filter both ways? In other words, does it filter noise from coming into the component and also from leaving the component and getting into other audio gear in close proximity?"
"The P-100 has a power transformer to reduce the incoming AC line voltage to the levels we need. More importantly, the P-100 contains a common-mode choke. This essentially consists of two identical low pass filters, one on each side of the low voltage AC line, coupled to each other in a way that attenuates high frequency noise going in both directions. Thus, we reduce any noise attempting to come in on the AC line, as well as noise coming back from the power device trying to go out to the AC line." |