Lifting the Veil:

The Science Behind the SSL Sound
When you hear an SSL, you hear the world with the veil lifted. This is no accident. In both the analogue anddigital domains, we accept no compromise. This is why you shouldn’t either...
Solid State Logic has been a leader in console andaudio tools for creative music production for 40years. Over that time the company has gained areputation for innovation, excellence, and service,and our products are held up as benchmarks for
professional audio technology.

Stable, Low Noise Gain Control

Most manufacturers use VCA (Voltage ControlledAmplifiers) and ‘fixed-reference’ DACs for controlling
attenuation or gain - either for convenience, or lower
cost, or simplicity. SSL has pioneered the use ofM-DACs (Multiplying Digital-to-Analogue Converters)in SuperAnalogue technology, enabling ultra-low
noise and precise tracking, even with variabletemperatures.

Our philosophy is simple. We spare nothing indesigning and manufacturing the best precisionmusic tools available anywhere. There is no single
magic stage in any SSL product. Everything from thepre-amps to the conversion, digital processing, FX
algorithms, and output stages plays its part.

No Electrolytic Capacitors

The physical construction of an electrolytic
capacitor means that its performance is imprecise,
it is vulnerable to electro-magnetic interference,and even expensive ‘high-quality’ electrolytics do
not meet our standards. In addition, over time andwith temperature variations, electrolytic capacitors
degrade and become ‘leaky’ - resulting in significant
noise issues, altered characteristics, and ashortened product life.

In the analogue world we have unrivalled experience,
knowhow, and legacy. Our SuperAnalogue
technology is the practical, no compromise
application of all those things, either in complete
products, or the analogue stages of our digitalconsoles and interfaces.
In the digital world, SSL has over three decades ofdevelopment behind it for the music, live, andbroadcast sound industries, and now the Tempest
platform gives our designers a new freedom tocontinually innovate and evolve superior algorithms
and architectures with the same commitment todistinction as we have in all aspects of our work.

Live: Blink 182“Other live consoles
seem to mimic
what’s happening on
stage... The SSL gives
you what’s reallyhappening.”
Jason Decter, FOH

Solid State Logic - Excellence in Music, Live, and Broadcast.

SuperAnalogueTM
SSL’s SuperAnalogue technology is not an accident,
nor is it magic, mythology, or ‘smoke and mirrors’. It
is the sum of an applied design philosophy, constantinvention, and dedication to optimising every detailof our precision audio products. There are many
contributing aspects, including our bespoke circuits,
ground-breaking low-noise gain control, servocoupled amplifier stages, and so on. Here are some of
the main features:

Wide Band AudioWe design and test our analogue circuits for abandwidth way beyond 20kHz, which many othermanufacturers consider to be ‘good enough’.

A lucky few people can identify frequencies beyond
20kHz. However, there is a secondary hearing
mechanism, directly related to ‘rise-time’ (thetransient performance of components) and evidence
to show that even though the basic frequency
spectrum of human hearing degrades over time,
our sensitivity to rise-times does not. In addition,
Transient Intermodulation Distortion (TIM) is areal - if difficult to measure - issue that brings highfrequency ‘waste’ to bear on the audible spectrum inpoor or bandwidth-limited designs through feedback
paths in amplifier circuits, for example.
For fast, accurate rise times, and low TransientIntermodulation Distortion, SSL implements
precision, high-frequency analogue technologies andtests everything to better than 80kHz.

SSL avoids using electrolytic capacitors for decoupling between analogue stages whereverpossible. Instead we use advanced DC servo
coupling techniques for low noise, high precision DC
offset control.

Broadcast: Zen Broadcast“System T is by far
the best sounding
broadcast console
I have ever mixed
on... It’s a gamechanger...”Kevin Duff,Sound Supervisor

solidstatelogic.com

Lifting the Veil:

The Science Behind the SSL Sound
When you hear an SSL, you hear the world with the veil lifted. This is no accident. In both the analogue anddigital domains, we accept no compromise. This is why you shouldn’t either...

Low Noise Design

Analogue design is a juggling act that must always
balance the power / noise / heat triangle. That is,
if you want low power and low heat, you get highnoise. If you want low noise, you cannot have lowpower. While advances in component and power
supplies inevitably bring greater efficiencies (alegacy 48-channel SSL 9k console drew nearly 4.5kW
while a modern 48-channel Duality console draws
about 1.5kW), specifically designing for low power
consumption will always result in compromise.
SSL designs precision, low noise music circuits.

Discrete Design

Many modern analogue audio products are theresult of the ‘cookbook’ approach - where off-theshelf blocks are strung together to fulfil a practicalbrief, but lack the additional details that take themfrom functional to fantastic. To do that, you have tounderstand how to augment commercially available
components with discrete elements, do original
research, and sometimes even design your own
components.

Studio: Nicky Romero“With the AWS, noquality is lost; andwhen you play the mix
live, no other song
will stand out morethan the one that’s
mixed on an SSL...”
Nicky Romero,Producer, DJ
SSL does not do ‘datasheet design’ and continues tooptimise and improve upon datasheet specificationsand ‘serving suggestions’ - we have even licensed
our advances back to semiconductor manufacturers.
We have built up over 40 years of experience andexpertise in improving the canon of analogue music
electronics to continually exceed and progress ourown high standards.

The VHD Pre

The VHD (Variable Harmonic Drive) mic pre is now a common fixture in many
Solid State Logic products, offering the user an all-analogue variable mic precharacteristic from the clean SuperAnalogue path through a blended range of
2nd and 3rd-order harmonics. At lower gain settings, VHD adds gentle valvestyle warmth or a touch of transistor edge. As the gain is increased, so does thedistortion, until at high gain settings it delivers fierce, trashy transistoresquegrunge.
The VHD circuit is actually derived from an early SSL experimental mic-preproject that was shelved at the time because the distortion was too high!
Unusually though it produced 2nd harmonic distortion rather than the 3rd
harmonic distortion normally associated with solid state technology. This is
why it was re-visited later on when SSL engineers were looking for a musicalway to add distortion back into our SuperAnalogue designs. The core circuit waspatented, and we added the mix pot to balance 2nd and 3rd order harmonics foreven more flexibility.

Audio Switching

Audio switching is extremely common in analogue
audio circuits - for everything from switchingprocessing stages in and out to routing, soloing,muting, and so on. SSL uses both relays and an
active JFET design with optimised dual-device
topology for exceptional distortion-free switching
performance.

Transformerless Design

Transformers are an effective component for low
audio levels and for bringing character to particular
processes, but at line level they introduce low
frequency distortion and high frequency roll-off- unless they are physically large enough, whichmakes them heavy, costly, and space-hungry.
SSL uses its own output driver configurationthat emulates the floating characteristics ofa transformer-coupled output but without thedistortion.
Our philosophy is simple. We spare nothing indesigning and manufacturing the best precisionmusic tools available anywhere. There is no single
magic stage in any SSL product. Everything fromthe pre-amps, through the line level electronics,conversion, digital processing, FX algorithms, andoutput stages plays its part.

Live: Depeche Mode
“You want somethingthat will work every
day, sound good, andtravel on the truck...
So SSL is the onlychoice.”
Antony King, FOH.

DIGITAL
There is no fundamental, direct link between
the quality of a digital audio algorithm and theunderlying technology choice - whether that system
is floating point or not, whether it is based on DSP,
FPGA, or CPU, and so on. Any fit-for-purpose root
platform, with enough processing power and careful
implementation, can be ‘good enough’.
However, there are many facets of digital technology
choices that enable excellence - that give designers
the freedom to develop systems and algorithms freefrom the traditional constraints that can prevent
other platforms from reaching their full potential.
Solid State Logic designs without compromise, so wecreated a platform where channel count is no longer
an issue, where latencies are measured in single
samples, and where the power, speed, and flexibilityof the foundation allows us to devise algorithms anddynamic architectures free from the limits that othermanufacturers have to combat every day. The SSL
Tempest audio engine with Optimal Core Processing(OCP), together with our Solid Clock technology, giveus that freedom.

Audio InsightMultiplexed displays andLEDs in SSL digital products
are refreshed at a rate thatis a multiple of- and locked
to the current operational
sample rate. If the console isrunning at 96kHz, the refresh
rate is 384kHz - over 3000
times the refresh rate of an
average domestic TV. Any undesirable aliasing imposed on
the audio as a result of the display electronics is always
reduced to DC... That is, it disappears!

solidstatelogic.com

Lifting the Veil:

The Science Behind the SSL Sound
When you hear an SSL, you hear the world with the veil lifted. This is no accident. In both the analogue anddigital domains, we accept no compromise. This is why you shouldn’t either...

SolidClockTM

Jitter is variation in a clock signal that can cause
distortion and noise in a digital audio systemthrough a form of frequency modulation. It isa very specific kind of noise, often confused inmeasurements with harmonic distortion and results
in a degree of ‘unease’ in a listener.
To address this, SSL developed SolidClock, an ultralow jitter clocking technology that guarantees clock
deviation of just a few pico-seconds and anaccuracy of better than one part per million exceeding all current standards by a wide margin.

Live: Imagine Dragons“It was great tobe able to bringup channels thatsounded good rightout of the box”
Scott Eisenberg, FOH

Tempest – A CPU Audio Engine

The Tempest Engine is an SSL CPU-based designthat uses two multicore processors - one dedicatedto control and display; the other running a RealTime Operating System (RTOS) with our patented
Optimal Core processing (OCP). OCP’s main task is toguarantee deterministic, real-time performance evenwith heavy memory exchange loads. This enables
us to execute multiple complex, high resolution
algorithms at very low latency without relying on
additional FPGA bus-summing or any extensive
external routing hardware. Multiple processing cores
are seen as a single processor, which eliminates the‘farm’ latencies seen in multiprocessor systems.
Others often have to sacrifice latency for algorithm
quality. There are no such limits for SSL.

Ultra-low Latency Processing

Latency in digital audio is an inevitableconsequence of processing large amounts of data.
On many systems, such as DAW-based plug-in
platforms, and DSP and FPGA farms, it is often avariable and significant issue.
In the SSL Tempest Engine, almost all processing
blocks have a latency of a single sample. That is true
however big the block is, and whatever the sample
rate of the system is. For example, every FX
algorithm in the FX rack (except linear phaseprocesses and algorithms that, by definition,
introduce delay) has one sample latency; every
movable processing block in a processed path has
one sample of latency. If those blocks were not
movable and we treated a channel as a single block- that too could have one sample latency. One
sample latency at 96kHz equates to 0.01ms of delay.

Two Hearts

SSL’s latest digital consoles
for live sound and broadcast
actually have two hearts –both analogue and digital.
The Live consoles – L200,
L300, and L500 – andour new broadcast audio
production environment– System T – both have
Tempest cores, though theybuilt, from the ground up, fortheir own applications. Bothalso have SuperAnalogue
I/O, available either locally(in the case of the Liveproducts) and through SSL’s
Network I/O stageboxes – allof which use SuperAnalogue
or mic-pres and output stages.

Broadcast: Canal+

Studio: University of York“The sound qualityof the wholesystem is regularlycomplimented byour operators, andthey love the SSL
user interface andprocessing - its highcapacity and sonicperformance is amazing.”“Listening to that kindof quality, you know
you’ve heard what
is possible... I thinkthat’s important,because you cancontinue to strive
for that in your ownwork.”

Jean Marc Delage, Technical Executive
Compare that to the range of latencies at various
sample rates in typical computer / plug-in-based
environments. Single plug-in latencies of 300
samples (about 3mS at 96kHz, or 300 SSL processingblocks!) are not unusual, and can be much higher.
A single DAW-based native EQ plug-in that uses over
5000 samples at 96kHz carries 50mS of delay!

Dynamic Bit Depth

Inside the Tempest Audio Engine bit depth isallocated depending on the needs of the process.
There are virtually no limits to digital headroom or
precision anywhere in the system and processes are
given the resources they need, as they need it.

Runtime Variable Architectures

For the users, the ability to design their own consolearchitecture for any given project is a boon to any
production, and a direct result of our multi-core OCP
technology. New inputs, outputs, channels, busses,
and routings can be created without interrupting
audio, and the processed path processing blocks
can be moved around in a simple drag-and-drop
interface without re-setting the console or muting
other channels.

Ben Eyes, Studio Manager / Sound
Engineer, Trevor Jones Studio.

EXCEPTIONAL SSL
Solid State Logic treats every aspect of its
technology research and product design with equal
importance. We are constantly finding new ways toimprove both the sound, and the experience.
We understand that professional music and audio
production tools have to be creative, precise,and efficient in order to make the grade. We
also understand how to make that happen, withmeticulous research and sophisticated design
workflows.
That is why SSL is such a respected force in musicstudios, broadcast facilities, and live venues
worldwide - and will continue to be so.

More Information
For more information on our studio,
broadcast, and live products, both digital andSuperAnalogue, visit the SSL website here.

solidstatelogic.com