Upgrades


	Upgrades


Most of the following upgrades can be applied to all of our power amplifiers at the time of manufacture, but some are available to Audion customers who already have our products.

Although upgrading can be expensive, dramatic improvements can be made to the overall sound of a system. But where do you start? How far do you go? And which upgrades are the best to try first? We have found that one of the biggest improvements at the cheapest price is hard wiring. This is point-to-point wiring where each component is physically joined to the next without using a PCB, thus giving the absolute best possible path for signals to travel down

	Once this is achieved, you then need to upgrade the signal path wire or the components within it. For the components, the first to be introduced should be the Black Gate capacitors. These capacitors are the best in the world and enhance the signal to noise ratio, lower the harmonic distortion, and sound better in almost every application.

		See list below

Next, I would opt for Tantalum resistors which are very low noise and relatively cheap to upgrade. Signal capacitors are a major consideration and can be very expensive depending on the type you wish to upgrade to. Pound for pound, the Copper Foils are an excellent solution and require at least 50 hours of burn-in time before they start to settle down and come into their own, but the difference they make can be dramatic. You should also look at the new breeds of Teflon caps available. Silver wire has the best qualities as far as conductors for audio are concerned, and can be an excellent upgrade. However, some audiophiles will argue that too much silver can make an amplifier sound a little bright, and actually prefer some copper to remain in circuit. My opinion here (having built a solid silver wired amp recently) is that if you have all silver in the amp then rather than being bright, what you actually hear is speed. As far as other upgrades are concerned silver plated plugs and sockets are fairly inexpensive, but silver wired transformers are not! Customers who have purchased silver wired transformers from us have been very happy with the results - so they do work!. Power supplies too are a good area to look at, the bigger is not necessarily the better, Blackgates are very good, but try removing the electrolytics and replacing with super grade polypropylenes.. The speed increase is dramatic.

At the end of the day upgrading can be a difficult decision, and a lot can depend on finances, but consider this; listening pleasure comes as standard with our products, so what you do there after can only make it better!

All factory upgraded products come with a certificate of conformity stating the upgrades carried out by us at our factory.

Note - we are currently have a cage that can be retro-fitted to our amplifiers for customers who have young children, or are gererally worried about exposed valves. We also have newly acredited CE approval on some of our products and are working on the rest of our products in the near future. This is not effected by the absence of a cage due to current CE approval that we already have for some of our power amplifiers in the current chassis. We do have a cage available (its ugly and looks like a shopping basket - in my opinion)

Options

1:).. Hard wiring
2:).. Change Cathode Bias capacitors to BlackGates Level 0
3:).. Change Cathode Bias capacitors to BlackGates Level 1
4:).. Change Power Supply capacitors to BlackGates
5:).. Change Output tube heater supply to BlackGates
6:).. Change Signal capacitors to Copper foil in Oil
7:).. Change Signal capacitors to Teflon in Tin foil(V-cap)- Fantastic!!
8:).. Change Signal capacitors to Silver Foil in oil (Exotic)
9:).. Add Tantalum resistors in signal path
10:).Change volume Pot to Stepped Attenuator (3 Options - ALPS, Goldpoint or (Vishay Dale-My preffered)
11:).Add Silver Input sockets and output binding posts.
12:).Internally wire all signal path in 99.999% pure silver
13:).Internally rewire all other wiring in silver including earths.
14:). Change internal inter-connect from socket to attenuator
15:). And finally change your output transformer to half or fully solid silver wound (huge difference)

There are other options not listed here, you yourself may have ideas for upgrades that we haven’t even thought of, please do feel free to email or call and discuss any of these options with us.