Creek destiny brochure
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Page 1
Conception to Reality Over the last few years, Mike Creek has become eager to take his company more up-market. The amount of similarity there is when designing budget products that work well but cost a fraction of those very esoteric products and brands which fill the pages of the world's hi-fi magazines is often misunderstood. Mike knows a thing or two about designing budget products, that goes without saying. How would he cope with the rigours of designing such exclusive and exacting products the high-end consumer is used to buying? 'Well', he says, 'thank goodness for team work'. The Destiny product range was conceived to replace the renowned Creek 53 series, but during the design stage, such were the efforts made by the Creek team to improve the already exceptional 5350SE and CD53 that, in reality, a very different product emerged. Form and style The Creek design created a brand new case style, with the aid of 3D solid modelling software. They specified only the best components for every section of the amplifier, to fully exploit the capabilities of the already excellent 5350SE circuit. The casework used by all Destiny products is constructed from custom made extruded aluminium sections, machined and anodised to a high finish to enable the massive 4mm thick top and bottom panels to be bolted to the front, rear and side panels. Using countersunk stainless steel screws thereby forming an extremely rigid and smooth structure, the Destiny amp is enormously strong. To damp the effects of vibration from possibly affecting the sonic performance, custom moulded Sorbothane TM feet have been fitted isolating the case and its contents from a shelf or mounting platform. Reliability To allow good ventilation and reliability, the Destiny amp uses large custom heatsinks for each channel together with significant areas of ventilation slots on the top and bottom of the case. Being an all aluminium construction, the whole case will eventually become warm, as it radiates the heat generated by both amplifier circuits. Large solid aluminium disc feet are a new feature of the Destiny design which also increases the space underneath for air flow. Sonic Values Improvements to the layout and wiring of the Destiny amplifier has made a substantial improvement to the sonic performance, when compared to the illustrious 5350SE. The decision to retain the motorized 27mm high grade ALPS 'Blue Velvet' volume potentiometer, instead of using a more popular digital volume control contributes significantly to its superb performance. Loudspeaker connection is now via 8 gold plated, touch-proof, 4mm style, high current binding posts. The Destiny Amp has the unusual feature of allowing the user to choose between a sonically perfect passive (no gain) pre-amplifier and a high precision, active pre-amplifier. The active stage, which uses a Burr-Brown OPA-2134 precision Op-Amp for each channel, has the added feature of a +3dB, +6dB or +9dB gain boost, user selectable with a 3 way slider switch, located on the underside of the pre-amp section. To further enhance the performance the Destinys pre-amp and power amplifier can be joined and separated by a push button switch, recessed behind the rear panel. Signal paths, to and from the pre and power amplifier internally, are carried by audio grade shielded cables. Special Features A new feature for the Destiny amp is low- current standby operation. To achieve this, the amp has a constantly powered, small toroidal transformer and power supply dedicated to running the microcontroller and all its digital circuitry. If all protection conditions are satisfactory, a high current relay will connect the mains voltage to the amplifier's power transformer, to power-up the amplifier and all other analogue circuitry. To expand the control of the Destiny product range, a custom Creek bus system is in design to allow the user to connect to a (RS232 style) room controller. Creek plans to introduce such a device in 2006, however proprietary types are also suitable. Serial RJ45 connections are found on the rear of the Destiny range products. Most types of dynamic headphones can be connected to the standard size ¼" jack socket on the front panel, for high performance reproduction. The Destiny integrated amplifier is supplied with Creek's new system remote handset providing full control for all Creek products. Modular Options A new, modular plug-in feature allows the Destiny amp to have a highly flexible option for Aux Line input.Firstly, there are dedicated Destiny balanced input MM or MC Phono circuits available, which exploit the balanced nature of Phono cartridge wiring, to significantly improve interference suppression and provide studio levels of accuracy to the venerable vinyl disc source. For digital enthusiasts, Creek plans to offer a high-end 24 bit D to A converter to allow the amp to accept SPDIF signals on both Aux1 inputs. The Destiny amp will automatically recognise which plug-in feature has been installed and indicate this on the front panel. The basic product comes with a linking PCB that treats Aux1 as a line level input. Techno-babble The Destiny's unique MOS-FET power amp circuitry is an evolution of the design first used by Creek products in 1993. Improvements in the Destiny include the use of SMT (Surface Mount Technology) to reduce the size and space of the amplifier circuitry and improve the layout. This allows the signal path and amplification to be located on the top layer of the circuit board and the power supplies and ground plane to be located on the bottom layer. 'Dual Mono' layout and construction and a massive 300VA low noise toroidal transformer with separate windings for the pre-amp and power amp circuitry has greatly improved the performance. In addition, the left and right channels now have their own low impedance DC power supplies, fed from two separate Shottky Barrier diode bridge recti- fiers and multi-capacitor reservoirs, totalling 20,000 microFarads. This allows the Destiny to output more than 100 Watts per channel into an 8 Ohm load, both channels driven and a massive 200 Watts into 4 Ohms, one channel driven. Input selection is now performed by a separate relay for each of the 5 line inputs plus the single tape loop. Input selection is visibly indicated by LED's which have four, user adjustable, brightness levels. Protection Modes Protection of the amplifier and ancillary products under fault conditions is facilitated by an array of sensors and measurement circuits feeding-back information to the microcontroller that monitors the amplifier constantly for over-temperature, over- current, DC offsets, power supply status and over-drive situations. If any of these conditions is exceeded the micro will take the appropriate corrective action. This can include, muting the input signal, separating the speaker outputs and, in extreme cases, switching off the mains supply to the power amplifier circuitry. Destiny Integrated Amplifier
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Lineage The CD50mk2 was the best sounding CD player Creek Audio ever produced. It out-performed all of the company's previous players in the area of sound quality, playabil- ity and reliability. It was also the first CD player Creek produced using a ROM drive, instead of the more usual CD transport. It built on the experience of the earlier CD50 mk1 and CD53, which won many accolades for high quality sound reproduction. Sound quality, of the CD50 mk2 was, however, as high as Creek could make within its budget constraints. Destiny Creek's objective for Destiny is to make the highest quality product it can, by fully exploiting the CD50mk2's basic electronic design concept. By removing budget price constraints, selected components have been used to open-up the performance to the max. The Destiny CD achieves real 'High-End' performance in all areas of sound quality, engineering and construction. Never Judge a Book by its Cover The new Destiny casework design uses heavy extruded aluminium sections and turned control knobs and buttons, machined by computer aided manufacturing techniques, to achieve a very high quality finish. SorbothaneTM moulded feet, are also used to isolate mechanical vibration and improve sonic resolution. However, the outstanding contribution Destiny's new casework has made to the appearance is not at the expense of the internal electronic design. High quality gold plated double sided circuit boards are mainly populated with (Lead Free) surface mount electronic devices to create an ideal environment for the digital and analogue circuitry to be optimised. Analogue and digital domains are fully isolated to remove any possibility of interference or blurring of the audio signals. How the CD Transport System Works The Destiny CD uses a custom made DVD ROM drive, (DVS-710A) similar to that used by any high grade DVD player. Creek have customised the firmware to create a regular x2 speed, high resolution, disc drive system suitable for CD only reproduction. Copy protected and multi-media discs are supported by this drive and if, in the future, any firmware upgrades are required, these can be supplied on disc or down-loaded via the Creek web-site. Raw digital data is out- put from the transport via an ATAPI bus sys- tem to the Destiny CD's main processing board. Custom electronic buffering (FPGA) circuitry stores the data momentarily before correcting any errors and re-organising it into a (I2S) format, suitable to be fed to the Destiny's digital to analogue converter (DAC) circuit. Power Supplies To optimise the Destiny CD's performance it uses a total of 3 encapsulated toroidal transformers mounted on a separate power supply circuit board, together with a fully shielded multi-element mains filter and mains voltage selector switch (115-230V AC). The filter not only prevents interference but also filters any mains disturbances from affecting the reproduction quality of the player. Three transformers are used to isolate the digital, analogue and transport circuits. To reduce interference further and improve efficiency, all rectifiers in the power supply are Shottky Barrier types. To reduce the power supply's impedance, all decoupling capacitors are audio grade, high temperature (105 degree C) types. In total there are 16 regulated power supplies used to isolate the circuitry in the Destiny CD player. Master Clock Perhaps the most important, but least mentioned, part of any CD player is the master clock. To clock the data through the Destiny CD a low phase noise (5pS), temperature controlled, master clock oscillator is used, which is powered by a low impedance voltage regulated power supply. Jitter is the key to achieving high performance in digital products and the lower the jitter is, the better the CD player will sound. To further enhance its performance, Creek has introduced additional re-clocking circuitry between the Transport circuitry and DAC, to eliminate timing errors (jitter) from corrupting the digital data. The Destiny CD player produces exceptionally low (150 picoseconds) jitter on its analogue output. Digital to Analogue Circuitry To maintain a sonic family resemblance to other Creek CD players, the Destiny continues to use a Crystal Semiconductors24 bit 192 kHz, Delta-Sigma DtoA converter. Fine tuning and attention to power supply requirements has allowed the Destiny to extract the maximum performance from this excellent DAC. Needless to say, CD Players read discs that are recorded at 16 bit and 44.1 kHz resolution. Creek engineers do not believe that up-sampling will improve the performance of this player. Audio Output Buffer and Filtering From the output of the DAC, additional analogue filtering is required to remove all high frequency digital artefacts. In the Destiny CD, instrument grade, OPA134 op-amps are used in the audio output to buffer each channel and filter any unwanted digital artefacts. These op-amps are also powered separately by their own low noise regulators and mains transformer. Audio signal path passive components are selected for sonic purity, so the Destiny uses high-stability MELF type resistors and film and polypropylene type capacitors only. Audio output RCA sockets are individual high-grade, solid, gold plated types. Digital Output For use with external digital converters, the Destiny has a transformer coupled SPDIF output via RCA connector and an optical output via a TORX connector, on the rear panel. Control Creek's SRC system remote handset is supplied with the CD player providing full control not only of this product, but all Creek's other IR controllable models. It has also incorporated a Creek (CAN) bus system to link to other Destiny products. In 2006, Creek will produce an interface for (CAN) bus to RS232 serial bus, allowing Destiny products to link to proprietary multi-room controllers. Also in 2006, Creek will produce a room controller of its own. Please check our website for further developments. The Destiny CD player has been designed to ideally, although not exclusively, partner Creek's Destiny integrated amplifier. Destiny products are available with either silver or black front panels. Destiny CD Player