Electronics & signal reconstruction

The Böhmer Audio electronics start out with a cutting edge analog design. The analog stages are all individually filtered and regulated with extremely high quality components, there are no capacitors in the signal path and it is kept as simple and short as possible. The digital circuits use state of the art components generating as little interference as possible and the clocking circuits use components normally only found in state of the art RF measurement equipment.

On top of that throughout the whole electronic design cutting edge RF-design rules are employed, keeping noise and interference in check avoiding pollution of the sensitive analog and clock circuits. All the RF-design tricks learnt designing the Forsell CD-player beginning 25 years ago up till today are implemented in the Böhmer Audio electronics.

The individual component choices in the design might surprise and are not always the ones normally found in high end equipment but this is the very nature of a state of the art design, if it aims at something above the presently established level of performance it has to be different and the proof in its success is ultimately in the audible performance.

On top of the state of the art design of the electronics there are a number of other unique elements implemented in the DSP. Once a DSP is added to a digital system there are a lot of things one can do to the audio signal to improve sound.

In the beginning there was the so called over sampling of the digital signal before it arrived at the DAC. Then there was up sampling to a higher sample rate and lately we have apodising appearing in a few designs.

During the design process we have looked carefully into the problems with analog signal reconstruction and found that a lot of things that can be improved compared to what is considered state of the art today which really only are at a relatively infant stage of development.

We applied the same knowledge of psychoacoustics we used in the development of our unique room correction to the analog signal reconstruction and the DSP algorithms we developed to improve the sound from our DAC circuit.

We employ completely unique signal reconstruction algorithms run in the DSP that enhances the subjective sound quality and on top of those use unequalled apodising filters that removes any perception of the fact that the sound is originating from a digital source, making it analog sounding in the best sense of the word.

Still all the benefits of digital are preserved, we have not accomplishing the improvements by removing resolution to achieve a nicer sound, adding second harmonic distortion or some of the other usual things many designs incorporate to ameliorate problems with digital emanating from sub optimal design choices.

On a final note, due to the very fast developments seen in digital audio one can easily end up feeling a bit uncertain about how future proof a piece of equipment is. The Böhmer Audio electronics is highly modular in its design making it easy to exchange circuits boards at a relatively modest cost should an improvement become available. The DSP algorithms and all of the firmware and software are also easily upgradeable to make it as easy as possible to keep a unit up to date.

Furthermore, because state of the art components used throughout the design, the life expectancy of the electronics has a MTBF approaching 30 years of continuous operation. The units can be left on all the time, only consuming a few watts, without any risk of shortened life. It is actually recommended to keep the units powered since the circuits perform better when they have had time to thermally stabilize.