Toroidal Transformers

Hi Tony,

There are a lot of advantages and many of them tightly connected together. Let's start with ribbon microphones--in those we use amorphous tape wound toroidal cores, only.

In general, the toroidal transformers have no air gap and have perfect magnetic properties, which reduces leakage, all kind of distortions, greatly minimizes losses and provides much better coupling. Also, they have by far superior efficiency, so together with using Amorphous material (which has much higher permeability), we are getting a good bass response with much less primary turns. This greatly decrease the copper resistance of the transformer (which results in less noise and higher output). Typically, our ribbon transformers have Pri DCR 0.002 Ω and Sec DCR around 3.5 Ω (for comparison, most of the commercially available transformers have Pri DCR 0.05--0.1 Ω and Sec DCR 70 Ω).

Our ribbon toroidal transformers show almost no impedance raise up to almost 100kHz, which is another reason we can achieve superior High Frequency response because the impedance raise would load those.  

We also offer toroidals for condenser microphones. In fact, a $5000 top of the line Pegasus condenser microphones from Ronin did use our toroidal transformers. For those we use Ni80% tape wound cores and can do any ratio. The main thing--because they are so efficient we need to use bigger cores to get a good overload on low frequencies, so their diameter is 1.5". To reduce capacitance we wind them chambered and typically get DCR of around 100 Ω for the Pri.

Their sound is quite different from the regular core transformers--very transparent and 3D. Of course, you could use them in any LDC microphones, if there is enough space.

Best, M