Single-Ended Class A

(c) Nelson Pass, Pass Labs

Single-Ended Class A amplifiers have certainly hit it big in the four years As in art, classic audio components are the results of individual efforts
since we began testing the first Aleph 0. So is this just another audio fad, and reflect a coherent underlying philosophy. They make a subjective
or is there something fundamental about this kind of design, justifying a and an objective statement of quality which is meant to be appreciated.
revival of the old approaches to amplification? It is essential that the circuitry of an audio component reflects a
philosophy which address the subjective nature of its performance first
When I started designing amplifiers twenty-five years ago, solid state and foremost.
amplifiers had just achieved a firm grasp on the market. Power and
harmonic distortion numbers were the important thing, and the largest Lacking an ability to completely characterize performance in an
audio magazine said that amplifiers with the same specs sounded the objective manner, we should take a step back from the resulting
same. waveform and take into account the process by which it has been
achieved. The history of what has been done to the music is important
We have heard Triodes, Pentodes, Bipolar, VFET, Mosfet, TFET valves, and must be considered a part of the result. Everything that has been
IGBT, Hybrids, THD distortion, IM distortion, TIM distortion, phase done to the signal is embedded in it, however subtly.
distortion, quantization, feedback, nested feedback, no feedback, feed
forward, Stasis, harmonic time alignment, high slew, Class AB, Class A, Experience correlating what sounds good to knowledge of component
Pure Class A, Class AA, Class A/AB, Class D, Class H, Constant bias, design yields some general guidelines as to what will sound good and
dynamic bias, optical bias, Real Life Bias, Sustained Plateau Bias, big what will not.
supplies, smart supplies, regulated supplies, separate supplies,
switching supplies, dynamic headroom, high current, balanced inputs Simplicity and a minimum number of components is a key element, and
and balanced outputs. is well reflected in the quality of tube designs. The fewer pieces in series
with the signal path, the better. This generally true even if adding just
I have to admit that I’m responsible for a couple of these myself. one more gain stage will improve the measured specs.

Apart from digitally recorded source material though, things have not The characteristic of gain devices and their specific use is important.
changed very much. Solid state amplifiers still dominate the market, the Individual variations in performance between like devices is important,
largest audio magazine still doesn't hear the difference, and many as are differences in topological usage. All signal bearing devices
audiophiles are still hanging on to their tubes. Leaving aside the contribute to the degradation, but there are some different
examples of marketing hype, we have a large number of attempts to characteristics worth attention. Low order nonlinearities are largely
improve the sound of amplifiers, each attempting to address a additive in quality, bringing false warmth and coloration, while abrupt
hypothesized flaw in the performance. high order nonlinearities are additive and subtractive, adding harshness
while losing information to intermodulation.
There has been a failure in the attempt to use specifications to
characterize the subtleties of sonic performance. Amplifiers with similar Maximum intrinsic linearity is desired. This is the performance of the
measurements are not equal, and products with higher power, wider gain stages before feedback is applied. Experience suggests that
bandwidth, and lower distortion do not necessarily sound better. feedback is a subtractive process; it removes distortion from the signal,
Historically, that amplifier offering the most power, or the lowest IM but apparently some information as well. In many older designs, poor
distortion, or the lowest THD, or the highest slew rate, or the lowest intrinsic linearity has been corrected out by large application of
noise, has not become a classic or even been more than a modest feedback, resulting in loss of warmth, space, and detail.
success. For a long time there has been faith in the technical community
that eventually some objective analysis would reconcile critical listener's High idle current, or bias, is very desirable as a means of maximizing
subjective experience with laboratory measurement. Perhaps this will linearity, and gives an effect which is not only easily measured, but
occur, but in the meantime, audiophiles largely reject bench easily demonstrated: Take a Class A or other high bias amplifier and
specifications as an indicator of audio quality. This is appropriate. compare the sound with full bias and with bias reduced. (Bias
Appreciation of audio is a completely subjective human experience. We adjustment is easily accomplished, as virtually every amplifier has a bias
should no more let numbers define audio quality than we would let adjustment pot, but it should be done very carefully). As an experiment
chemical analysis be the arbiter of fine wines. Measurements can it has the virtue of only changing the bias and the expectations of the
provide a measure of insight, but are no substitute for human judgment. experimenter.

Why are we looking to reduce a subjective experience to objective As the bias is reduced the perception of stage depth and ambiance will
criteria anyway? The subtleties of music and audio reproduction are for generally decrease. This perception of depth is influenced by the raw
those who appreciate it. Differentiation by numbers is for those who do quantity of bias current.
not.

Pass Labs: Articles: Single-Ended Class A page 1

If you continue to increase the bias current far beyond the operating air, the positive pressure perturbations will be slightly greater than the
point, it appears that improvements are made with bias currents which negative. From this we see that air is phase sensitive.
are much greater than the signal level. Typically the levels involved in
most critical listening are only a few watts, but an amplifier biased for ten As a result of its single-ended nature, the harmonic content of air is
times that amount will generally sound better than one biased for the few primarily 2nd order, and most of the distortion of a single tone is second
watts. harmonic. Air's distortion characteristic is monotonic, which is to say its
distortion products decrease smoothly as the acoustic level decreases.
For this reason, designs which operate in what has been referred to as This is an important element which has often been overlooked in audio
"pure" Class A are preferred because their bias currents are much larger design and is reflected in the poor quality of early solid state amplifiers
than the signal most of the time. As mentioned, preamp gain stages and and D/A and A/D converters. They are not monotonic: the distortion
the front ends of power amplifiers are routinely single-ended "pure" increases as the level decreases.
Class A, and because the signal levels are at small fractions of a watt,
the efficiency of the circuit is not important. The usual electrical picture of an audio signal is as an AC waveform,
without a DC component. Audio is represented as alternating voltage
The "purity" of Class A designs has been at issue in the last few years, and current, where positive voltage and current alternates with negative
with "pure" Class A being loosely defined as an idling heat dissipation of in a reciprocal and symmetric fashion. This fiction is convenient because
more than twice the maximum amplifier output. For a 100 watt amplifier, it lends itself to the use of an energy efficient design for amplifier power
this would be 200 watts out of the wall on a constant basis. Designs stages known as push-pull, where a "plus" side of an amplifier alternates
which vary the bias against the musical signal will generally have bias operation with a "minus" side. Each side of a push-pull amplifier handles
currents at or below the signal level. This is certainly an improvement the audio signal alternately; the "plus" side supplying positive voltage
from the viewpoint of energy efficiency, but the sound reflects the lesser and current to the loudspeaker, and the "minus" side supplying negative
bias point. voltage and current.

Given the assumption that every process that we perform on the signal Problems with push-pull amplifier designs associated with crossover
will be heard, the finest amplifiers must employ those processes which distortion have been discussed elsewhere at length, and one of the
are most natural. primary results is non-monotonicity. Class B and many AB designs have
distortion products which dramatically increase with decreasing signal.
There is one element in the chain which we cannot alter or improve This is reduced greatly by Class A mode, but crossover distortion
upon, and that is the air. Air defines sound, and serves as a natural remains as a lower order discontinuity in the transfer curve.
benchmark.
For reproducing music as naturally as possible, push-pull symmetric
Virtually all the amplifiers on the market are based on a push-pull operation is not the best approach. Air is not symmetric and does not
symmetry model. The push-pull symmetry topology has no particular have a push-pull characteristic. Sound in air is a perturbation around a
basis in nature. positive pressure point. There is only positive pressure, more positive
pressure, and less positive pressure.
Is it valid to use air's characteristic as a model for designing an
amplifier? If you accept that all processing leaves its signature on the Descriptions of push-pull often illustrate this type of operation with a
music, the answer is yes. picture of two men sawing a tree by hand, one on each side of the saw.
Certainly this is an efficient way to cut down trees, but can you imagine
One of the most interesting characteristics of air is its single-ended two men playing a violin?
nature. Sound traveling through air is the result of the gas equation:
An analogy using a violin or similar stringed instrument illustrates single-
PV1.4 = 1.26 X 104 ended operation nicely and points out the control and finesse which can
be achieved when only one gain device controls the performance of a
where P is pressure and V is volume. The small nonlinearity which is the gain stage.
result of air's characteristic is not generally judged to be significant at
normal sound levels, and is comparable to the distortion numbers of fine By contrast, push pull Class A circuits have two opposing gain devices
amplifiers. This distortion generally only becomes a concern in the producing the output signal, and though it is industrially effective and
throats of horns, where the intense pressure levels are many times efficient, it is not the most delicate way to amplify a signal. Push-pull
those at the mouth, and where the harmonic component can reach circuits give rise to odd ordered harmonics, where the phase alignment
several per cent. reflects compression at both positive and negative peaks and crossover
nonlinearity near the zero point.
We can push on air and raise the pressure an arbitrary amount, but we
cannot pull on it. We can only let it relax and fill a space as it will, and Only one linear circuit topology delivers the appropriate characteristic,
the pressure will never go below "0". As we push on air, the increase in and that is the single- ended amplifier. Single ended amplification only
pressure is greater than the corresponding decrease when we allow air comes in pure Class A, and is the least efficient form of power stage you
to expand. This means that for a given motion of a diaphragm acting on can reasonably create, typically idling between three and five times the

Pass Labs: Articles: Single-Ended Class A page 2

rated output power. lower transconductance and higher intrinsic resistance and distortion
than the newer generations. They also were rather anemic in terms of
Single-ended operation is not new. It is routinely found in the low level their current, voltage, and wattage ratings.
circuitry of the finest preamplifying stages and in the front end circuits of
the finest power amplifiers. The first tube power amplifiers were single- On top of that, looking at the schematics of early and even contemporary
ended circuits using a single tube driving the primary of a transformer. Mosfet amplifier designs, we see that they usually have been simply
dropped in as replacements for bipolar devices in Class B and AB
In 1977 I designed and published in Audio Magazine a single-ended designs, without regard for their particular linearity requirements, and
Class A amplifier using bipolar followers biased by a constant current without taking advantage of their unique characteristics.
source. A considerable number of amateurs have built the device, rated
at 20 watts output, and many have commented on its unique sonic Given the Mosfet characteristic, it is easy to understand why early and
signature. It is one of the very few examples of a solid state single- even contemporary amplifiers using them have not achieved the
ended output stage available. measure of sonic performance that the devices seemed to offer.

Single-ended Class A operation is less efficient than push-pull. Single- The promise of the transconductance characteristic in power amplifiers
ended amplifiers tend to be bigger and more expensive than push-pull, in providing the most realistic amplified representation of music is best
but they have a more natural transfer curve. fulfilled by Mosfets in single-ended Class A circuitry where it they be
used very simply and biased to very high currents.
A very important consideration in attempting to create an amplifier with
a natural characteristic is the selection of the gain devices. A single- Last year I published a single-ended Class A power amplifier design in
ended Class A topology is appropriate, and we want a characteristic The Audio Amateur Magazine. It employs only one gain stage for the
where the positive amplitude is very, very slightly greater than the entire amplifier. Called the Zen amplifier (after all, what is the sound of
negative. For a current gain device, that would mean gain which one transistor clapping?) it illustrates the extremes of simplicity that can
smoothly increases with current, and for a tube or field effect device a be achieved with Mosfets operated in single-ended Class A and high
transconductance which smoothly increases with current. objective and subjective performance. More information on the Zen
amplifier and its successor, the Son of Zen, is available from The Audio
Triodes and Mosfets share a useful characteristic: their Amateur.
transconductance tends to increase with current. Bipolar power devices
have a slight gain increase until they hit about an amp or so, and then As yet, very few other single-ended solid state amplifiers are available
they decline at higher currents. In general the use of bipolar in a single- on the market. This will change as the demand continues to increase
ended circuit is a poor fit. and as other designers learn how to build them.

Another performance advantage shared by Tubes and Fets is the high In the meantime, transformer coupled single-ended triode amplifiers are
performance they deliver in simple Class A circuits. Bipolar designs on the alternative, using very large gapped-core transformers to avoid core
the market have between four and seven gain stages associated with saturation from the high DC current. These designs reflect more
the signal path, but with tubes and Mosfets good objective specifications traditional thinking in single-ended amplification. They suffer the
are achievable with only 2 or 3 gain devices in the signal path. characteristic of a loosely coupled transformer, more limited wattage,
and higher measured distortion than their solid state counterparts,
Yet a third advantage tubes and Mosfets have over bipolar devices is however they still set the standard for midrange lucidity, and are not to
their greater reliability at higher temperatures. Single-ended power be dismissed.
amplifiers dissipate comparatively high wattages and run hot.
Besides being easier to use, the primary advantage of Mosfets over
In a decision between Triodes and Mosfets, the Mosfet's advantage is in tubes is that they operate at voltages and currents appropriate to
naturally operating at the voltages and currents we want to deliver to a loudspeakers without conversion, and do not require an output
loudspeaker. Efforts to create a direct coupled single-ended triode transformer.
power amplifier have been severely limited by the high voltages and low
plate currents that are the province of tubes. Regardless of the type of gain device, in systems where the utmost in
natural reproduction is the goal, simple single-ended Class A circuits are
Power Mosfets have an interesting character in that they have relatively the topologies of choice.
high distortion until you run quite a large amount of current through
them. This makes them very suitable for pure Class A operation,
particularly single-ended. It also makes them far less suitable for Class
B and AB operation where they become quite non-linear near their cutoff
point, and require a large amount of negative feedback correction to
deliver clean output.

Not all power Mosfets are the same, either. The early Mosfets had much

Pass Labs: Articles: Single-Ended Class A page 3