Zen Variations 7 — Nelson Pass / 2004

One of the performance issues raised by the original Son of Zen (Audio Electronics, #2, 1997) was its efficiency figure, which was charitably described as 4% (500 watts in, 20 watts out). You may recall that this was dictated by the original requirements - no feedback, no capacitors in the signal path, and a single gain stage. Zen Variation 6 relaxed the requirements on feedback and capacitors in order to provide a tutorial exercise about “super-symmetric” feedback. The performance was improved in distortion and output impedance, but the efficiency was only slightly improved, largely because we used most of the… More...

Zen Variations 6 — Nelson Pass / 2004

U.S. Patent # 5,376,899 describes an amplifying circuit topology that takes advantage of the character of matched balanced amplifiers that are cross-coupled to provide cancellation of distortion and noise. The result provides high performance with very simple linear circuits and has been dubbed Super-Symmetry, an homage to particle physics, and is also known popularly as the X circuit. Super-Symmetry works by exploiting the complementary characteristics of matched balanced circuits to differentially reject distortion and noise, and applies a small amount of feedback to extend this symmetry, making the distortion and noise even more identical on each half of a balanced… More...