If you¡¯ve visited us or paid attention to our appearances at various hi-fi shows over the last year or so, you¡¯ll have seen mysterious looking units that bare all their inner workings. These were initial designs and prototypes of Edge, and they¡¯ve been in the works for quite some time. Here¡¯s how Edge came to be.
50 Years of British Sound
In the build-up to our 50th anniversary, the engineering team were assigned a unique brief: if all time constraints were taken away and all hurdles were removed, what could we create? What could be achieved if we took our 50 years of audio expertise and started with a completely blank sheet of paper? The result is Edge. The pinnacle of our hi-fi heritage and embodiment of our signature British Sound.
The team had complete freedom to select components, materials and technologies based solely on their musical merits and how well they articulate our vision of natural, unadulterated sound. From this, five key technologies contribute to Edge¡¯s phenomenal sound:
1. A unique approach to the PCB
With Edge, we set ourselves a goal to keep the signal path as short as possible to significantly reduce the chance of any colour or distortion being added to the audio, ensuring a pure and natural sound. To achieve this, the printed circuit board needed to be unlike any other.
We completely removed all the capacitors from the signal path and instead introduced a DC coupled topology to the board. We decided that capacitors needed to be removed from the signal path, simply because they can be responsible for adding more distortion and colour than many other components. This technology prevents the delivery of DC to your speakers by using dedicated servos to inject equal and opposite amounts of DC, therefore eliminating it completely. With this improvement though, the signal is incredibly clean and concise, vastly reducing colouration.
Additionally, we used a solid-state volume control, ensuring that channels were kept perfectly balanced, regardless of how loud Edge is played.
2. Opposing Symmetry Twin Toroidal Transformers
We pioneered the use of toroidal transformers in amplifiers right back at the launch of our first product, the P40, which lead to improved performance (and you can learn more here). With Edge, we took this a step further, introducing a second transformer and stacking it in opposing symmetry to cancel out magnetic interference and ensure the amplifier is capable of outstanding power. No matter how hard you push the amp, you¡¯ll get this same clear result, so you can enjoy every detail and nuance of your music without any distractions.