The individual sections of the pre-amplifier i.e. Analogue and Digital are self contained stages having their own Power Supplies voltage regulation and circuit board assemblies The analogue stage has a 50 watt toroidal transformer and the digital stage a 15 watt E core transformer. The digital facility power supplies are totally isolated from the analogue stage

The Pre-Amplifiers analogue stage incorporates a Sugden VCV circuit in its most developed advanced form. This circuit has a high impedance input section, current gain stage (without attenuation problems) which drives a folded cascode stage into a Class ‘A’ output stage. The folded cascode circuit facilitates a wide bandwidth with maximum dynamics and low capacitive connectivity.

The tonal balance is irrespective of the output level and the sense of headroom, imaging and soundstage is to be believed.

The DAC facility to interface with digital products includes inputs for USB, Optical and coaxial S/PDIF signals. The actual DAC is a non-oversampling, digital filtering- less, DAC where the digital interface transceiver is a Wolfson Micro electronics device. The DAC also includes Post Conversion Filtering in the analogue output stage. The USB signal received is converted via a circuit including a Texas Instruments Universal IC whose SPDIF output signal is re-clocked and de jittered by the Wolfson interface transceiver.

This DAC configuration has been adopted for Sugdens Digital Processing after many many hours of actual auditioning of a wide sample of DSPs. The auditory perception/Musical performance in terms of dynamic balance, tonal balance, voice and emotion, are so much more satisfying and Sugden’s preference.