We hand-build our components in Cleveland, Ohio, whose downtown features the mighty Cuyahoga River emptying into Lake Erie. Our first products, our flagship Tributary Power Supplies feed your valuable components valuable, clean, linear power.
Cuyahoga Hi-Fi was started when we were unsatisfied with the noise on our analog system. We finally found that the source of our issues were cheap AC/DC wall adapters. We found that using a reference power supply with our components we could achieve lower overall noise from leaking into our speakers. This was especially dramatic with our analog turntable system.
The Tributary is our flagship, linear power supply for your audio devices, both analog and digital.
There are two kinds of power you may have heard of: alternating (AC) and direct (DC) current. All power that comes to our homes is AC whereas most of our electronics require DC to operate. Those black wall adapters are typically switch-mode power supplies (SMPS). They work by converting the existing AC from its native 50-60Hz to very high frequencies, which allows efficient, and easy conversion to DC power. The benefit of this approach is two-fold: they are very inexpensive to manufacture, and are very efficient, generating little waste heat. They come with one major downside: noise.
Due to the high-frequency switching used to generate the DC current, a lot of extra noise is introduced into the signal. For many devices, such as smartphone chargers, digital clocks, or small appliances, this noise is completely harmless. In audio devices, this noise can find its way into the signal and then out of our speakers, often at the same 50-60Hz as the main AC power!
Linear power works differently. In our Tributary supplies we use a transformer to lower the AC voltage down to a manageable 20V AC level. This AC is then rectified and filtered into clean DC power. Using an industry-standard regulator we ensure a constant output voltage up to 2A. We use high quality transformers and filter capacitors to ensure the cleanest DC power.