Introducing the Fourth Generation SV Series High Resolution Control Room Amplifiers…
the fastest, lowest distortion, widest bandwidth professional amplifiers ever built.

Although our evolving High Resolution Series has repeatedly set new standards for control room amplifiers over the last decade, still lower noise and triple ought distortion figures in the critical mid and high frequency bands, pushed to levels previously thought unobtainable, have yielded our smoothest, most transparent presentation to date. Building on our second and third generation Intelligent Output Device designs, the new IOD circuit, featuring an active DC blocking servo for balanced offset and near-perfect current sharing between output devices, provides even greater stability and linearity than its predecessors, while maintaining the high speed wide bandwidth musicality for which they are famous. The Four Hundred SV remains the ultimate nearfield amplifier, with the Model Six Hundred SV and One Thousand SV available for higher power applications. Unlike most amplifier lines where a noticeable difference in sound quality or presentation is evident as you move from larger to smaller models, all three SVs sound absolutely identical until each runs out of power supply. And even though each one is designed to excel at a specific task, the Four Hundred for high and medium impedance nearfields, the Six Hundred for high current delivery to low impedance and complex reactive loads, and the One Thousand for higher voltage swing into larger, high impedance loads, there's no sense of a smaller amp sounding "higher fi" at the expense of a strong bottom end, or a larger amp sounding "ballsier" but less articulate. That said, there is certainly some logic to using a One Thousand on a pair of small nearfields such as our PRM165s in the interest of guaranteeing unlimited dynamics when tracking open mics, as opposed to mixing at modest levels close in. This is the system jazz veteran Joe Ferla has been traveling with for several years now, recording and mixing the likes of David Sanborn, Pat Metheny and John Mayer. Many engineers and artists who have heard Joe's rig, or at least the buzz it's created, have quickly followed suit.

…and congratulations to Joe and our newest member of the 165 family, Chad Franscoviak for winning the 2011 Grammy for best engineered album, John Mayer's "Battle Studies"

In the years since we brought the professional recording community its very first dedicated control room amplifier, the original S400 back in 1987, our evolution has followed a steady course developing the ultimate in straight-wire zero-feedback mosfet design. The evolution has turned to revolution. The pretty face has stayed the same, and still no global feedback... but the wire's gotten straighter and shorter.

Fully differential from input to output and utilizing a split-dual toroidal power supply, our radical new design approach taking full advantage of extraordinary advancements in intelligent output device technology has enabled us to lower distortion in the critical mid and high frequencies to equal preamp levels, without the application of any external feedback circuitry, yielding immediately apparent dramatic improvements in clarity, definition and musicality. In addition, these new intelligent output devices justify their greater cost over traditional power transistors by providing a previously unobtainable level of stability and reliability as a result of their internal self-biasing and self-protecting nature. With inherent thermal limiting at the individual device level being the only protection necessary besides the mains fuse, there is no audio compromise. Each device adjusts bias for itself, rather than having to cut current.

With drastically lowered output impedance and no power-robbing current limiting or need for external "thermal bias" and protection circuits, our new uncluttered design affords all of the benefits of pure Class-A zero-feedback operation without any of the drawbacks... reducing heat, eliminating crossover distortion and providing extreme output linearity for unequalled timbral and spatial detail as well as effortless transient capability and remarkably precise deep low frequency response.