Audiophilepure

The Pascal UMAC power amp module was easy to spot and I was pleased to see such a neatly laid-out preamplifier board. There’s an XMOS input receiver and a PCM1792 DAC chip. Mounted on the power amp module’s heatsink are three full-width PCBs full of Tesla coils that together take up roughly a third of the U-580’s internal volume, and as we will see, not without reason. What I could not find, at first glance, was the preamp’s power supply. I assumed that it could be powered from the Pascal module’s integrated power supply but that was not the case. Then, I noticed that the incoming mains power cable led to the preamp/DAC PCB where it was split off to the power amp module. And then I saw it: underneath a wide flex cable was a positively tiny switched power supply brick. It’s common practice to use either a linear power supply or a custom-built switched supply for analog sections but Aavik does not tend to do things in a conventional manner.

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