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...

Super-Symmetric Amplification — Nelson Pass / 1998

U.S. Patent # 5376899 describes a new amplifying circuit topology that takes advantage of the character of special matched balanced amplifiers that are cross-coupled to provide cancellation of distortion and noise. The result provides high performance with very simple linear circuits, better than previous efforts by an order of magnitude. We have dubbed the approach Super-Symmetry (Su-Sy), an homage to particle physics. Super-Symmetry works by exploiting the complementary characteristics of precision matched balanced circuits to differentially reject distortion and noise, and extends this symmetry to make the distortion and noise virtually identical on each half of a balanced amplifying circuit.… More...