For forty years, Cloud’s products have been respected by the commercial sound industry for their excellence of design, manufacturing quality and extreme long-term reliability. Such a reputation is no longer sufficient on its own: today’s products must exhibit true energy efficiency as well.
At Cloud, we have been actively redeveloping our product range since 2017, and now incorporate numerous engineering solutions in our design and manufacturing processes specifically to reduce energy consumption throughout the entire life cycle of the products. For the end-user, the primary advantage of an energy-efficient design is obvious – a lower operating cost.
With our power amplifiers, improved efficiency basically means much lower mains power consumption for the same output power. All our recent amplifiers exclusively use Class D designs in the power stages: means that the output devices are either fully ‘on’ or fully ‘off’ at all times: in these states, minimum power consumption results. The switched-mode power supplies for these products offer improved Power Factor, which also contributes to lower power consumption. Compared to the earlier designs they replaced, our MPA MK2 mixer amplifiers and CA and CV Series power amplifiers can consume as little as a quarter of the mains power under similar operating conditions.
In many commercial installations, audio equipment may often not be called upon to handle signals for extended periods of time – this is especially true of PA/VA systems. To take advantage of this low duty cycle, our designs feature an Automatic Power Down mode, which places the amplifier into a very-low-power quiescent state if no input signal is received for a preset time. Our high-power CA and CV Series amplifiers consume less than 2.5W in this mode.
An important consequence of improved efficiency is lower heat dissipation. This means that our current products can be installed without demanding ventilation requirements, meaning that a wider range of installation locations may be suitable. An associated advantage is that cooling is either by convection (silent) or with thermostatically-controlled low noise fans.
Energy efficiency elsewhere in the production chain is also improved as a result of the increased electronic efficiency. Our products are much smaller and lighter than their predecessors, leading to a reduction in packaging and lower energy requirements during transportation.