Vertere’s new Imperium Motor Drive follows quite closely behind the new SG-PTA tonearm and VeRum interconnect as the ideal products to match the Vertere SG-1 record player. Demand for the latest Imperium Motor Drive was driven by owners of SG-1 and RG-1 record players looking for a Motor Drive superior in performance to Tempo but more affordable than the Reference MD.
Imperium’s design derives from Vertere’s Reference Motor Drive: it includes a simplified power supply and control functions. It is available to order now and will sell for £7,950, (€9.998, $11,995, CAD$14,995, AUS$ 17,995). The Imperium packaging includes a motor link and a 2m Redline mains cable.
The key was to make a motor drive with as pure a sine and cosine wave output and as little noise as possible. The design and cabling also had to consider possible RF pickup and ingress. Enclosed in a CNC milled solid aluminium shell lies a twin-regulated linear power supply feeding the primary circuit, the 12V external supply for the record player’s illumination and the digital regulation for the microprocessor and DAC.
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.
Attention to detail, 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 first, and then the whole PCB is secondarily shielded using a stainless-steel plate. 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.