Our commitment to you
We are committed to provide you with the best possible product and service. We can provide small or large quantities of Superpower regulators, given adequate lead time for procurement, assembly and testing. Contact info is below the history.
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In honor of Sam Wilensky and Jim Williams.
Belleson History
The founder, chief "enginventeer" and mishap
Our founder, Brian Lowe, is a serial entrepreneur who has created multiple commercial products for other companies and his own. "Mishap" is not his spouse! (More later on this.)
He was naturally one of the kids who took stuff apart and shoved hair pins into electrical sockets. If you're reading this you were probably one of those kids too. His audio circuit design experience dates to 1971, when he designed his first reverb unit with a ceramic phono cartridge, 4 ball point pen springs, a model car hub cap, a small transistor amplifier kit and a speaker.
He also got inspiration from his high school friend Robert Frazier, who repaired a 12 inch woofer by removing its molten voice coil with a razor blade, reformed a new coil onto a piece of paper around a broom handle and reattached it with little strips of paper soaked in glue. The speaker was never "as good as new" but it played very well in the back of a 1965 Corvair. Unrelated, Robert also showed Brian how to make gun powder with fertilizer, charcoal and sugar, a skill he's never put to practice.
The other half of that story, "how did the voice coil get melted?", is another learning experience. If you have an electric bass guitar and no guitar amp, you plug the guitar into your Bogen stereo receiver. If you want it to sound like it's played through a fuzz box, you turn the volume all the way clockwise. What you may not yet know is that the amplifier's output transistors are now clipping, essentially delivering very high DC current at its power supply voltage. So if you twang the bass strings loud enough, you put enough current through the speaker voice coil to melt the copper.
Turns out that this high power also blows out the 2N3055 output transistors in the receiver, so once the speaker is fixed, it's time to fix the receiver too. With no diagnostic equipment, the way to find the bad parts was to open the case and, with headphones, start listening at the output transistors, slowly move the headphone connector back from there along the signal chain until the signal sounds ok. Then replace everything between there and the output. That actually worked and the amp was repaired.
So the founder's early history with audio electronics was a series of mishaps that taught lessons. In the 1980s, he was author of a somewhat controversial article in issue 1 of Glass Audio called A Self-Bias Servo for Push Pull Amps.
He's also designed circuits as varied as a cascode tube preamp (which involved another mishap of cross-connecting the B+ and the filaments and resulted in vaporized filaments and resistors in flames), a high speed (for the time) CMOS digital character generator IC, monolithic op amps and voltage regulators, a chip-and-wire 18 bit D/A converter and 16 bit A/D converter, a diamond tester. He also spent a portion of the 1980s designing test equipment for op amps, data converters, micro-machined sensors and other analog and mixed signal devices.
In the 1990s he started and sold a commercial software company, started a company making caller ID systems and software components. Later that decade he wrote a book The Fundamentals of Mixed Signal Testing which covers analog and DSP techniques for measuring and testing analog and mixed signal devices, and its accompanying training software.
The Company
To the topic of the company, Belleson was first incorporated in 2000 in the Chicago IL area. With a long-time ambition to create audio electronics, the original name was to be Belle Chanson, for "Beautiful Song." However, Americans were not comfortable saying the name and it wasn't available for the internet. Belleson was available, simpler and says "beautiful sound" in Latin–based romantic languages, although it's not really gender-consistent.
Oddly, the first product was a software application for editing web pages. A cool product, its market was dominated by large companies such as Microsoft and Adobe. With dynamic web content becoming the next wave, it didn't get any traction.
Fast forward to 2009, when Belleson's founder returned to his true love, audio electronics, and began version 3 of a phono preamp design that had roots back to a 1983 tube-based phono amp. During the search for a great power supply, Brian studied the existing super regulator designs, including the Walt Jung design, its Andrew Weekes variation, one by John Roberts in his "Preeminent Preamp" article in Audio Amateur 3/85, and others. He built a Weekes equivalent and used a JFET as a level translator instead of a zener diode. This is the basis for his U.S. patent 8,294,440.
Brian is still chief inventor, designed, updates and manages the web site and store, and answers technical questions, while Christina handles manufacturing, burn-in, packaging and shipping. They have shipped thousands of high performance regulators since January 2010, including standard products and custom designs for equipment manufacturers.
The Belleson Superpower SP was introduced in late 2009 and began commercial sales in 2010. Since then,
the versatile design has been morphed into multiple variations from a 1.2V, 2A regulator to a 400V 500mA version.
Also, continuous research and development has allowed performance enhancements and product improvements
to be consistently introduced:
- 2010: SP 500mA, 5 to 30V
- 2012: SPJ 2A, 3.3 to 30V
- 2013: SPHV 1A, 400V
- 2014: SPLV Low voltage 1.2V to 2V output
- 2014: Lower noise SPJ, <1µV/Vout
- 2015: SPHP 1000W, 10A, 100V
- 2016: SPZ 3A 30V TO-220 footprint
- 2018: SPX 3A Max performance ultra high PSRR, ultra low Zout
The hard part now is how to improve on something as good as SPX?