Son of Titan. To the ancient Greeks, Titan was Hyperion's sire whilst Hyperion and his son Helios personified the celestial sun. Ancient texts mention the god's likeness immortalized in the Colossus of Rhodes guarding the island's harbour in 280 BC. It's written that this statue stood 70 cubits or 33 metres tall, making it one of antiquity's seven wonders of the world before it collapsed in the earthquake of 226 BC.
This artist impression is from website Travel Letter. It reminds us that the new colossus is America's Statue of Liberty whose bronze plaque makes reference to the original with "…not like the brazen giant of Greek fame with conquering limbs astride from land to land…"
Dragan's offspring is a 10Hz-500kHz (-0.5/-2dB) circuit of 11/8wpc into 8/4Ω power. For speakers that's approximately 300B SET turf, albeit sans output iron. Armageddon scales those figures up to 20/30wpc.
For headphones, the Ge power curve keeps halving to 5.5/2.7wpc into 16/32Ω and halving beyond wherever load Ω doubles. Its ~3wpc into 30Ω tends to be ideal for Susvara, Magna & Immanis.
S/NR is 90dB, input impedance/sensitivity 100kΩ/0.7V. Dimensions are 30x24x9cm WxDxH. Weight is 5kg.
The special Germanium transistors occupy the class A input buffer ahead of the 24-step series attenuator followed by gain stages with Jfet and bipolar transistors. Such a deliberately sequenced mix of gain devices suggests not a Molotov but Sex on the Beach cocktail. A few ingredients each with its own taste get mixed at just the right dosages for the compound final flavour and desired behaviour. For more, I asked Dragan about his Ω on the head/speaker outs; the cascaded stages and any local/global feedback; and what makes his Germanium parts special relative to their performance specs, electrical behaviour and placement within the circuit.
Here it's interesting to know that SAEQ's first amplifier of 1973 used tubes; and how Christiaan Punter concluded his review of Hyperion Ge 50 years later: "…total absence of electronic signature… no artificial edge… avoids ever sounding soft or round…never holds back dynamically… on Xavian and Magico speakers… amazes with remarkable stability and grip given its modest power rating… sounds supremely liquid with a beguiling golden tube-like glow but this doesn't make the sound feel covered up, coloured or enriched. Rather, the musical presentation itself is truly rich in and of itself. If anything, I'd swear that I was listening to a superb tube amp."
Hyperion's product page promises "resolution and relaxation at the same time". It then lists Germanium's advantages as "higher current gain and linearity with bias voltage 2-5 times lower" than equivalent silicon transistors. To not overload his more sensitive Ge parts, Dragan limits Hyperion's input amplitude to ±6Vpp. Higher responsiveness to minute signal fluctuations claims enhanced low-level detail retrieval whilst also generating "opulence".
For deeper tech data, this 2016 article explains that the name Germanium honours German chemist Clemens Winkler who first isolated and identified it in 1886. "The material was long considered to be a poorly conducting metal. That changed during World War II when its semiconducting properties—its ability to switch between permitting/blocking current flow—were discovered. Solid-state Germanium devices boomed in the postwar years but silicon ultimately became the material of choice for logic and memory chips."
Why? "Silicon is far more abundant so a lot cheaper. It also has a wider bandgap, the energy hurdle that must be overcome for a transistor to carry current. The larger the bandgap, the harder it is for current to leak across the device when it's supposed to be off, draining power. As an added benefit, silicon has better thermal conductivity, making it easier to draw away heat so circuits don't overheat." [The following illustration by Jean-Luc Fornier is from the same article on https://spectrum.ieee.org.]
Alternative channel paths: There are multiple ways to create transistors with high-mobility nonsilicon channels. One approach is to build the nFETs from III-V compounds and the pFETs from germanium, growing patches of both materials on an insulator-topped silicon wafer [left]. As an alternative, both CMOS transistors can be built out of a solid layer of germanium [right], which can be bonded to a silicon wafer (also topped with insulator).
Why might today's need for higher speed revisit Germanium? "The answer is mobility. When close to room temperature, electrons move nearly three times as readily in Germanium as they do in silicon. And holes—a material's electron voids which are treated like positive charges—move about four times as easily. Because less voltage must be applied to draw those charge carriers along, circuits can also consume considerably less energy."
The article then has this table on how versus Silicon, Germanium compares to the Gallium/Indium arsenides as two other materials which researcher work on for more energy-efficient faster transistors. The upshot seems to be a potential renaissance for Germanium in next-gen transistors. The author opines that "Germanium, the primordial material of the solid-state age, could be a powerful elixir for its next decade." If so, what was old would be new again. Regardless, today's amplifier uses a last-century version already. Back to the future? As Dragan told us, he inventories enough of his NOS parts to sustain Hyperion production for years to come. Apparently Ge production in the USSR didn't stop until 1991 or later. It's how Alexei Syomin of Moscow's tube-based SA Lab can use various Ge in his extensive solid-state range. His GAP-07 headfi amp in fact combines SIT inputs with Germanium outputs. The only other modern hifi component with Ge parts I'm aware of is the DAC of UK tube-audio brand SW1X which depending on version uses them in the I/V stage and low-voltage power supply. But it's surely no coincidence that all three Germanium sightings are either from brands otherwise specialized in tube gear; or reference tube sonics for their one solid-state model with Ge parts.
As per Wikipedia, Germanium's major uses today are fibre-optic systems, infrared optics, solar cell applications and light-emitting diodes. Compounds of germanium appear as polymerization catalysts and more recently found use in the production of nanowires. It also shows up in chemotherapy. Ge is mostly mined from sphalerite as the primary ore of zinc but also recovered from silver, lead and copper ores. As for SAEQ the brand, it seems fair to note that 2024 marks it stepping out of its previous Raal association to sail firmly under its own flag with a now unified look across the portfolio. Informally we might call it SAEQ v2.0? Eagle-eyed readers already noted above that unlike Armageddon, Hyperion's power mains is on the rear. Depending on install, this could require some fumbling to reach?
