Samsung C-01

Where else than on TVK would you find this ?

Out of nowhere, bar a few late 70s low-end units, like Kyocera in 1982/83, Samsung went for ultra-high-end audio in 1996 with three ultra components and... quickly went away making 51% of Sony's LCD displays and many other far more lucrative businesses.

I have no idea if the C-01, M-30S and SP-01 were actually distributed and sold but two things are sure : Samsung spared no expense, and Samsung needed help from the outside.

The one and only catalog published is beautiful and well printed ; yet, as most high-end audio catalogs, it says a lot and very little at the same time :)

So the A-Series was built "perfectly", with only the "best parts", all designed and customed by Samsung's "R&D team" and the "cooperation of leading manufacturers".
The latter bit means the series were partly developed elsewhere, like Thule did for Teac (A-BX10, 1994) or Dan Anagnos for Sony (SS-1ED, 1999), but I have yet to find who was behind the engineering of the C-01 and M-30S. Mark Levinson perhaps ?


Anyway -
The C-01 is a true dual-mono 13kg preamp holding three toroidal transormers (L, R, Remote) with DC balanced inputs, high CMRR and a remote control acting through a six hundred 0,1dB steps digital regulator.

The high-grade phono stage can handle MM as well as MC cartridges but there is only one phono input and the spec for the MM input is at a very high 6mV...
The aux 2 input is in XLR balanced format, outputs are either RCA unbal or XLR bal.

Insulated double-sided glass epoxy boards, non-oxide copper bus bars and gold-coated WBT terminals, super-high spikey feet... and probably much more but nothing says anything about actual circuit design.

Optimum Thermal Simulation of Computer (OTSC) testing of each part and completed component was there to "assure the full elimination of sound quality variation".

Anybody know anything else ?