As this SideBar documents, Spemot the industrial supplier is a sizeable venture stacked with huge robotic equipment, assembly lines, warehouses, a resident engineering team, management offices and a sprawling basement packed with more machines and storage items. Soulution the upscale hifi producer is firmly embedded in Spemot but physically takes up far less space. Assembly is handled by two people, engineering is Christoph Schürmann for circuit wizardry and Patrick Wiersma for mechanical execution. Design firm Greutmann Bolzern authors the cosmetics.



Schürmann's circuits rely on high parts density with thick signal-path copper bus bars and overbuilt multi-stage dedicated power supplies.



This amplifier channel's proprietary 12MHz-bandwidth zero-feedback voltage amplifier is sealed and potted to avoid prying eyes. 14 bipolar Sanken output transistors couple to a thick temperature-controlled copper bar. Schürmann explained how his circuit does not rely on common transistor matching to operate perfectly within tightly regulated performance specs.



Here we see a provisional 700 mono amp power supply sub assembly with 710 stereo amp transformers to check available space for new boards required for the new CE standby power consumption regulation.



Size and weight of Soulution gears conforms to actual requirements, not other standards. Massive is the word.



These custom Soulution transformers are sourced from Nortel in Sweden and built by Nortel's Sri Lanka plant.





This bracket takes four of these 33.000uF can-style capacitors below. Total power supply filter capacitance of the 700 mono amp is 250.000 microfarads. It runs off 10 separate multi-stage stabilized power supplies and all rectifiers are fully discrete. The amp is fully linear to 100kHz and its slew rate is faster than 0.4 microseconds. "Extremely low total harmonic distortion is dominated by the benign 2nd harmonic and higher-order distortion is non-existent." Because circuit linearity does not depend on feedback, carefully calibrated global feedback is used exclusively for sonic—not measurement or stability— considerations, i.e. low-bass control and "precision in spatial reproduction".



A secondary power supply module.



More subassemblies.



240V 1000VA transformers for the 700 mono amplifiers, pen deliberately inserted for scale.



From the back of the assembly area, we are facing the play-test system.





TEAC/Esoteric transport mechanisms for the SACD player.







A Soulution preamplifier with its top down.



These SEAS-fitted speakers were an older Christoph Schürmann design. Swiss company Vovox provided the cables.

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