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Older news - January 2001

We have just received fresh photos of the nOrh 4.0 Ceramics from the factory. They are really beautiful.

Ceramic 4.0 - light blue #1 (view full-size image ~190k)

Ceramic 4.0 - light blue #2 (view full-size image ~180k)

Ceramic 4.0 - white on stand (view full-sized image ~219k)

We have recieved many e-mails asking for additional Boy Thai music. Apparently, one CD isn't enough. We are making available Boy Thai's Siamese Samba. "Boy Thai" is the brainchild of a group of young Thai musicians in search of the perfect East-West musical relationship. Heading Boy Thai are two young musicians from the opposite ends: Chaiyoot Tosa-nga, a descendent of one of the oldest classical Thai music families, and Sekpol Unsamran, a young veratile jazz saxophnist.

The music of Boy Thai is a blending of contemporary rhythms and the color and temperment of Thai music. It is what they proudly proclaimed as "Modern Thai Music", which they hope will give the listeners a vivid picture of the present Thai society where the ancient and the modern live harmoniously side by side.

Bangkok Post Sund January 14, 2001 has a an article on Boy Thai. You can read this online at http://www.bangkokpost.com/140101/140101_Outlook01.html

It is hard to believe it is the start of another year. 2000 was quite a busy year for nOrh. We grew by a factor of five last year. We expect to grow nearly as fast this year. In order to grow at this rate, we need to improve our ability to deliver.

Most audio companies are highly specialized. They build one product or a family of related products. When we started, we realized that in order to provide the highest level of sound through the entire audio chain, we needed to have products through the audio chain. Today, we now have customers who are using all nOrh equipment. We now have a CD player, preamplifier, amplifier, loudspeakers and subwoofer. We will continue to expand our product line.

Many audiophiles believe that one audio component can improve the sound of a system. The fact is, components can not improve the sound but each component has an opportunity to ruin the sound. The goal in audio is to generate the purest signal as possible and not alter that signal through the chain.

Most people are confused how amplifiers work. Most people I talk to think that a signal goes into one end of an amplifier and comes out larger on the other end. They think of amplifiers are a device with gain.

The fact is, an amplifier doesn't just provide gain. It copies the signal using a higher reference in order to enlarge the signal.

The reason that some amplifiers sound dull is that they are too slow to keep up with the input signal. Imagine you have two runners. One is going up a hill and the other is going down. If one runner is faster than the other, he will be going down the hill while the slower runner is going up. An amplifier that has a slow power supply or for other reasons has an output that is slower than the input will truncate the signal as it is going up the hill. This results is a flattening of the sound. This is why nOrh builds all their products for speed. We build amplifiers that exceed the speed of the input. The harshness you hear from amplifiers is caused by amplifiers that can only approximate the input signal and not match it exactly.

Some amplifiers try to hide their weaknesses by trying to distort the sound in a pleasant way. They dull the sound but at the same time attempt to sweeten the sound with a pleasant distortion. This is sort of like having your amplifier tell pleasant lies all the time.

High quality sound depends on generating a pure signal and maintaining the purity of the signal through the signal chain. If you ever hear anyone describe the sound of our electronics, they will use the world fast. Our focus is on building CD players that generate a high quality signal, a preamplifier that preserves that signal integrity and an amplifier that can accurately resolve all the detail while amplifying the signal.

We are starting to ship the Audio Control Amplifier (ACA). Werner Hartinger designed the circuit for us. He wanted to make some changes to the product a few months ago. This is after he had delivered a prototype that we thought was very good.

Werner has been tweaking and tweaking and we now have a preamplifier that I believe is one of the fastest, most linear and clean preamplifiers available at any price. The ACA has an output before clipping of 27 V. This is ten times more output than most preamplifier. This output will make it very easy to drive long cables and it will do a very good job driving headphones. The -3dB point is 1 Mhz! This is 10 times more bandwidth than some of the best preamplifiers on the market.

The ACA uses the DACT volume control, offers video passthrough, includes a phono input, uses all sealed gold contact relays and has a headphone input. The ACA uses the AD 797 op amp with a Burr Brown BUF 634 buffer stage. The unit houses the massive 85 VA transformer in a lower sealed section to isolate noise from the signal section. We set out to build the best preamp in the world. I believe we have done it or we have come close. The price for the ACA is $900.

We also now have a good supply of Multiamps. We have made a few minor changes in the Multiamp. Cosmetically, there are no changes. Inside, we have increased the size of the transformer and we are now using dual voltage transformers. The transformers are now toroidal rather than R-Core as we were not able to get dual voltage R-Core.

We are working on setting up a service facility in the US for our electronics. We will have more information about this soon.

The CD 1 will be reviewed soon on TNT. We have seen their review and it is very positive.

Ceramic speakers will ship very soon. We wanted to make the ceramics a very special looking speaker. I designed a new set of stainless steel feet for the speakers that gives them just the look I wanted. The ceramic 4.0s should be going out very the first week of January.

The 6.9 loudspeaker really excites me. I believe that this is probably the biggest bang for the buck in our line. The 4.0 certainly offers great performance but it doesn't have deep bass. The 5.1 has more bass as does the 5.2 Prism but these are still fairly modest speakers. The 6.1 has a very high-end sound. It is dynamic, smooth and efficient. The 6.6 is even more efficient. However, the 6.9 gets it all right. The tweeter is very smooth. The bass is spectacular. We have decided to make the 6.9 in a prism version and a drum version. The price each is $1195.00. We have a very limited number of wood drum 6.9s. The drum version goes down to 38 Hz -3 dB. If you want to be one of the few who get the wood drum version, please write.

We are also working on a ceramic and synthetic marble version of the 6.9. The synthetic marble version will use a material that is 77% marble powder mixed in Gel Coat and Resin. The material will be very hard, acoustically inert and somewhat lighter than actual marble. We will offer black, green (jade green) and white. The ceramic version will be offered in black. The finish on the black ceramic will be very shinny - similar to a gran piano finish.

The first nOrh 3.0s will ship this month. The price is $150.00 per pair shipped. The 3.0s are all shielded. These make very effective center and rear speakers. This is also a very good upgrade to an existing mini system or a way to upgrade the sound of some of the small subwoofer and satellite speaker systems.

Now that we have the preamp, CD player and amplifier finished, I am looking into an integrated amplifier. The design isn't finished but what I am looking to build is an 80wpc dual mono configuration. The unit would be very robust. The unit will be designed to provide a high-end level performance at a very low price. I also have new speaker ideas so I hope you will come back from time-to-time and see what is new.

I get a lot of questions that force me to do some research. I have recently received a lot of questions on the so-called digital amplifiers. Many readers believe this is a new technology and want to know if nOrh plans to build a digital amplifier.

I am more comfortable with digital than I am with analog. The reason is that I studied digital industrial design and microprocessor technology. I have also worked in the computer industry for 20 years. Many people in the audio world are not comfortable with digital and try to make comparisons between digital and analog that simply can't be made.

First of all, there are no digital amplifiers. Most of these amplifiers are Class D amplifiers. Class D amplifiers are not new. They have been around since the 1940s. In fact, Bose made a line of consumer products using Class D amplifiers in the 1970s and Sony had some receivers that used switching amplifiers in the early 1980s.

Most audio amplifiers today are either Class A or Class A/B. There are variations of these—some called Super Class A but most of the amplifiers are variations of A or A/B.

Class D amps work by switching between positive and negative states at a very high frequency. Because the amplifier is only working at the positive and negative points, these amplifiers are very efficient. They are able to use much less expensive switched mode power supplies. This results in a system that is potentially less expensive to build.

In the past, it was very complex to build a Class D amplifier using desecrate components. Today, Class D amplifiers are available as chips—making it much less complex to build Class D amplifiers. The major focus for Class D or switching amplifiers is for low-powered applications that use batteries. This includes laptops and other portable devices.

I believe that eventually more consumer grade equipment will use Class D amplifiers. It saves the manufacturers a lot of money.

Sonically, Class D amplifiers are still playing catchup to traditional amplifiers (well designed ones). Class D amplifiers can't match the damping factor of traditional amplifiers. The S/N ratios I have seen are not as good as standard amplifiers. There is also the complexity of filtering out all RF that would be generated at the frequencies these amplifiers have to work at.

The key thing is that these amplifiers have analog inputs and analog outputs. They work using Pulse Width Modulation. You can not input a CD signal directly into the amplifier. I have looked into switching amplifiers from Tripath and TI. The technology has many reasons to be exciting. However, today, I believe the very best amplifiers are the more traditional A and A/B designs.

Pictured above are our new production models of ceramic nOrh 4.0's.

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