What do Drawmer, Parasound and Amphion have in common? No, they're not unassembled Marvel Avengers. They are in fact the UK signal processing legend, a Californian amplifier builder and a Finnish studio monitor specialist, and they share OEM amplifier modules supplied by ETAL. These modules are now part of the product range known as Anaview – following the corporate assimilation of the latter by the former.
The design company Anaview was founded in Sweden in 2003, making custom Class D amplifier and power supply modules for the wider audio industry. In particular, two circuit solutions drew attention: Adaptive Pole Control (APC) and Adaptive Modulation Servo (AMS), now the basis of the three product series of most interest to pro audio manufacturers around the world.
The ETAL Group is a bigger Swedish organisation with key sales satellites in the UK, Boston MA and Asia and manufacturing facilities in China, Sri Lanka and Estonia. An even larger Swedish technical conglomerate, called the KAMIC Group, maintains ETAL as its magnetics specialist.
Ruuth was an ETAL R&D engineer for many years, designing inductive components many of which are still made today. The sales role now finds him liaising with leading pro audio manufacturers, among many others across entertainment technology and telecoms, and it's clear that whatever they do with the modules they do it from a starting point called Class D. What does this topology mean to ETAL?
"When Class D first appeared it was far from the quality of Class A/B," says Ruuth, "but eventually a few companies – and we are one of them – discovered how to keep that sound quality while getting all the benefits of Class D design. The benefit for the customer is that, with the use of Class D, the efficiency is so much higher: with Class A/B, 50% or more of the power you put in was just wasted into heat, which you have to deal with in one way or another; with Class D, around 95% of the energy you put in can be converted into sound.
The closest ETAL will get to finished amplifiers, for the foreseeable future, are the enclosed 'evaluation' blocks for compatibility testing by, for example, potential loudspeaker customers – a straightforward input and output signal – so 'Anaview' will not be appearing in a rack near you any time soon. The modules are very user friendly anyway, Ruuth says.
The company has announced the introduction of the new IPR Series of ultra-lightweight and efficient power amplifiers.