Imperium Motor Drive

The music we hear when playing vinyl records, in reality, comes from the motor! The motor is the only source of energy in the system.  It is this energy that drives the record past the stylus thus making the music we hear.

Any amount of noise or fluctuation in the drive system will adversely impact on the music.  Detail, dynamics, timbre, timing and musicality are just some of the qualities that will suffer as a result.

Imperium takes control of the record player motor and provides it with smoother drive with little noise as possible and lower distortion. Its internal circuit, as with the reference motor drive, is uniquely microprocessor based providing a pure sine wave in the digital domain and then converted to analogue via an on-board DAC. Two waveforms are derived, a cosine and a sine, which are then amplified using two bridged amplifiers to power the motor.

Exceptional attention to detail has been given to the whole design, including a gold-plated two-layer PCB utilising extensive ground planes, fully regulated voltage rails powering different circuit sections, and carefully selected components, ensure in-control and ‘clean’ final delivery of power to the motor.

The PCB mixes SMD and thru-hole components using the best of both technologies. Copper foil shields the entire digital, microprocessor and DAC circuitry is first, and then the whole PCB is secondarily shielded using a stainless-steel shield plate.

The double screened programmable and updateable microprocessor digitally generates the sine and cosine waves (which are switchable to be ± 0, 0.25%, 0.5%) to the equally double screened DAC. The output of the DAC feeds two ‘power amps’ provided by an extremely clean supply to drive the approximately 17V the motor requires.

The motor drive output is a high-quality gold plated 7-way thread-locked DIN connector, connecting Imperium power to the record player via a dedicated motor link cable.