Old Rube Goldberg would have thought this so nuts as to probably publish it in one of his cartoons – but still, great ideas usually start out as crazy fantasies. At least for me they do.
In 1989, a physics geek named Tim Berners-Lee had a problem: sharing documents with his colleagues was cumbersome and inefficient. A paper shuffle. At a time when few people owned computers or knew what the internet was, he came up with a crazy solution – hyperlinked text that could instantly connect related documents across a global computer network. This concept, which allowed users to click on a word and be taken to related information without having to physically deliver the piece of paper or book, laid the foundation for what we call today the World Wide Web.
A crazy, wacky idea, that would someday turn into something very useful.
On a very much tinier scale, I too had a dilemma. How to eliminate the problems of AC power in our homes: shorten and fatten the hundreds of feet of connecting wire, eliminate the problems of power sharing, and for the cherry atop the sundae, figure a way of adding capacitance to connected power supplies.*
*Which is essentially what the net result is of lowering the impedance by regulating and repairing the shape of the AC. If you can't do that externally, as I was trying to do, you could theoretically go inside each of your pieces of stereo equipment and double or triple the amount of power supply capacitance – something perhaps as impractical for me as shortening the wires in your home.
Clearly this was a pipedream, since at the end of the proverbial day what I needed to wind up with was a magic box that would be the first in a chain of hi-fi equipment – and I had already determined that placing a parallel device did little to nothing, while a box with a series element only made the problem worse.
On a nighttime walk an idea flashed into my head. Maybe I am thinking about this all wrong. Maybe, instead of trying to fix what is already broken, I start fresh. I ignore entirely what is the problem and build my own power generating station with perfect, clean, low-impedance regulated AC power available exclusively to our customers. Fuel it with the already broken power coming out of the wall.
Yes! Of course!
How might one do that? Well, a miniature version of how that is done in the first place. A motor and a generator.
Your city's power generating station uses some form of energy transfer to spin a generator and produce electricity (an electric generator is nothing more than an electric motor that is externally turned by something else). That external energy used to spin the generator is from the flow of water (a water wheel fed by a stream or a dam), or the rush of steam by the boiling of water turning a steam engine (the water is boiled from the burning of coal or natural gas or the heat of a nuclear reaction).
So, in my wacky idea, we turn it upside down. I proposed to use the electricity out of the wall to spin an electric motor, and that electric motor would be attached to an electric generator (another motor used in reverse). Since stereo systems don't take that much energy (compared to your whole home), this contraption wouldn't have to be too big. I sketched out this idea and figured I could build a reasonably small-sized box, probably no bigger than a power amplifier, and sell it as the perfect generating station for perfect power.
Excited, I laid out my idea to Terri one evening. She listened politely, asked a few questions, then asked me if I had lost my marbles.
"There's no way that thing's going in my house. And, wouldn't it need maintenance over time? What if it lit on fire? Overheated? A kid opened up the top and stuck their finger inside? And wouldn't it make noise?"
Oy. She was right.
But the fire had been lit, the path was clear. There wouldn't be any way to fix what is wrong with our AC power. I would have to figure out a better way to generate it from scratch.
My nutso idea of using an electric motor tied to an electric generator to provide perfectly regulated and pure AC to stereo systems had been shot down within seconds of presenting it. And, for good reason.
It was clearly impractical from any number of points.
But, the idea stuck.
If the AC power in our homes cannot be repaired, I knew it had to be generated from scratch.
For most of us, when we get stuck, we turn to a friend or a colleague. Sometimes that friend or colleague serves more as a sounding board than an advisor – and this works because in order to explain a technical concept to someone who is not technical, you have to break the idea down into its simplest form. And that action often results in you seeing the problem in a completely different light.
My friend and former colleague at Genesis Technologies Mark Schifter was always a good sounding board, as was my friend and our attorney, Peter Rudy. Mark's pretty technical, as is Peter, but not at a circuit-design level. So they were perfect for bouncing off this crazy notion – which I did.
Peter piped up and said, "oh, you're trying to build your own power plant?"
Bingo. Whatever we wound up with, now it would have a name. The PowerPlant.
Mark, on the other hand, thought it was a really good and novel idea and said, "have you asked Doug about it?"
Doug Goldberg is an interesting fellow. At the time, he was the director of engineering at the Skunk Works division of Northrop Grumman. Under his watchful eye were literally thousands of some of our country's brightest geeks and nerds. Engineers of all disciplines. And, at the the same time, Doug's one of us. A crazy audiophile. He had designed most all of the products from Mark's old company, Audio Alchemy.*
*Which is where I first saw the idea of separating out the I2S clocks and data from a DAC, which is where and how we would, years later, move from an RJ45 connector to an HDMI connector on all of our digital audio products. But, that's fuel for an entirely new series of historical posts.
I got Doug on the phone, explained my wacky idea to him and, within a microsecond, Doug came back with something that not only would change the course of PS Audio forever, but the audio industry itself.
"You're wife's right. It's a crazy idea. Why don't you just make an electronic version of your electric generator?"
"Say what?"
"A power amp fed by a sine wave oscillator. Simple."
Holy sh*t! Bingo! Nail on the head. OMG! Of course!
A power amplifier has all the right stuff. Designed properly, it can have extremely low output impedance, down to the depths of what's technically possible. In fact, a quick calculation showed me that its output impedance could be lower than the equivalent of a ¼-inch copper wire. That, in fact, it could be so low that it would be like camping out within an inch of the city's power generating station (probably too noisy for good hi-fi listening).
Simple and brilliant. Now, I had to figure out how to build such a thing.
Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/Loïc Manegarium.
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