Hi,
I'm one of the engineers that designed the magneto. First off, I'd like to say thanks for all of your valuable feedback!
We are super excited to enter the world of modular synths. There are a lot of awesome manufacturers making cool and inspiring products and a lot of musicians making great, otherworldly music.
In response to your questions regarding the power draw:
The Sharc processor used in the Magneto requires a lot of current at a low voltage (3.3V/1.2V core). Rather than drawing all of this current from a single supply, we use a custom multitiap flyback transformer to split the power draw between the +12V and -12V supplies. The primary for our flyback converter is the 24V potential formed by stacking the +/-12V supplies. The secondaries are +3.3V, +15V, -15V. The +/-15V are subsequently filtered and linearly-regulated to provide +/- 12V rails for our analog circuitry.
In addition to distributing the power draw, this scheme has a couple benefits for the audio performance.
1) The output windings of the the transformer are galvanically isolated from each other and from the primary. This allows us to carefully manage analog and digital grounds, preventing the digital portion of this design from bleeding into our low noise analog circuitry. Isolation from the Eurorack power supply ground also provides immunity from system noise.
2) Because we generate our own analog rails, we are also immune from noise on the +/-12V Eurorack supplies.
Cheers, Josh
