Graham Slee Elevator EXP Step Up Amplifier / PSU1 Power Supply – Silver

From British company Graham Slee HiFi System Components comes this “Step-up Amplifier” – the Elevator EXP has been designed to get the best out of your vinyl collection. In very good condition and suitably packaged, it comes complete with the PSU1 power supply unit, power cables and of course our 3 month warranty.
Graham Slee Say….
The Elevator EXP will give you hum-free sound, purer bass, greater definition and much more of your music.
In the beginning you’d buy a step up transformer (S.U.T.) to be able to use a moving coil cartridge. But they hummed and did weird things to the bass. The Elevator EXP changes all that.
The Elevator EXP is supplied with the PSU1 power supply, and a choice of voltages and power plugs.
The Elevator EXP is designed to step-up the tiny moving coil signal to the moving magnet level of a hi-fi phono amp input.
Whereas some moving coil cartridges will happily give their best with 100 Ω loading, others can be quite particular.
Rather than fiddling around with links or DIP switches, the Elevator EXP gives you all its loading options up front, right there on the front panel – making it easy to get your sound right.
The Differences Between The Elevator EXP And S.U.T.s
Part 1: the hum
For a start, the Elevator EXP doesn’t hum. Transformers do. To be correct, the transformer itself doesn’t hum, but the magnetic surrounding fields easily get induced into it.
These magnetic fields are predominantly mains-borne. There are a number of hum sources including all your mains powered equipment, surrounding mains powered products, and even the wiring you see, and the house wiring you don’t see – all emitting magnetic fields by differing amounts.
The SUT, being a transformer, is influenced by them all. The result is hum. No matter how well shielded its case or how well you carefully position it, in most cases that isn’t very successful.
The Elevator EXP is an amplifier – it doesn’t contain a transformer so it’s harder for hum to be induced into it.
Part 2: weird things to do with the bass
Bass frequencies are the lowest audio frequencies, below which everything becomes DC or direct current. DC doesn’t commutate from positive to negative – it doesn’t ‘cycle’ – so it cannot be transformed. Low bass frequencies to a transformer move so slow that they’re ‘almost DC’, As a result transformers distort most of all at low frequencies.
All sorts of tricks and adjustments are employed to reduce this distortion – many include the use of expensive metals and labour intensive winding techniques in a bid to overcome the bass distortion. This is why good S.U.T.s are so expensive.
But the distortion is never really overcome and in the place of detailed bass, all the transformer can really do is ‘fudge’ the sound. You might have heard people refer to the bass they get as a ‘smooth chocolatey sound’? I suppose that’s similar to fudge…
The electronics of the Elevator EXP however, don’t cause anywhere near such levels of distortion, so all the bass details – the layering and the timbre (the characteristic sound of an instrument or voice) is there to be heard and enjoyed.
Part 3: ‘signal theft’
All transformers require excitation current before they will pass any signal. Where do you think the S.U.T. gets its excitation current from?
Has it a power supply? No. So obviously it uses some of the signal as excitation current.
That would be OK but for the fact that magnetic cartridges don’t have a linear response – their bass is much weaker than the highs, and so more is ‘stolen’ from the lows.
That’s the reason you’ll often see additional components inside a S.U.T.’s casing – these being used to straighten-out the frequency response.
I think you’ll agree by now that the Elevator EXP step-up amplifier is the better option.
Suitable Cartridges:
Low output moving coil (MC) with output in the region of 0.15 – 0.8 mV (ref 1kHz at 5cm/sec)
The Elevator EXP must always be used between cartridge and a moving magnet sensitivity input. It must never be used ‘post EQ’ – after the moving magnet phono preamp.
Specifications:
Input Range: 0.15 mV to 0.8 mV
Output (for input range): 2 mV to 10 mV, suitable for a moving magnet phono stage input
Maximum Input: 378 mV rms (a very large overload margin)
Maximum Output: 4.914 V rms
Gain: 22 dB (13) < 10 Hz to 917 kHz (- 3 dB points)
Input Impedance: 23, 30, 100, 840, 1000, 5100 and 47000 Ohms
Output (driving/source) Impedance: 300 Ohm
Recommended Load Impedance: 47 kOhms phono stage preamp input
Noise At Output: – 99 dB CCIR Q-pk
Distortion: 0.02%
Frequency Response: < 10 Hz to 917 kHz (- 3 dB points)
Channel Balance: 0.2 dB
Channel Separation: 64 dB
Dimensions: 107 (W) x 180 (D) x 50 (H) mm