Creek Destiny CD, Destiny Integrated, Destiny Power Brochure

Integrated Amplifier

CD Player

A Word from Mike Creek

Performance figures for hi-fi products can be very misleading. With more than 35 years
experience in building high quality audio products I have made every effort with the Destiny
range to optimise the performance through appropriate use of modern and well established
technology, so as to have a meaningful benefit to the consumer. Some of my customers have
said to me that I am too much of a perfectionist and should speed up the development of my
new products, but I feel that our future in the Hi-Fi business is best served by being very
selective about quality and performance.

The Destiny products are my proudest creation so far.

Destiny

Conception to Reality

Over the last few years, Mike Creek has
become eager to take his company more
up-market. The amount of similarity there is
when designing budget products that work
well but cost a fraction of those very esoteric
products and brands which fill the pages of
the world's hi-fi magazines is often
misunderstood. Mike knows a thing or two
about designing budget products, that goes
without saying. How would he cope with the
rigours of designing such exclusive and
exacting products the high-end consumer is
used to buying? 'Well', he says, 'thank
goodness for team work'. The Destiny
product range was conceived to replace the
renowned Creek 53 series, but during the
design stage, such were the efforts made by
the Creek team to improve the already
exceptional 5350SE and CD53 that, in
reality, a very different product emerged.

Form and style

The Creek design created a brand new case
style, with the aid of 3D solid modelling
software. They specified only the best
components for every section of the
amplifier, to fully exploit the capabilities of
the already excellent 5350SE circuit. The
casework used by all Destiny products is
constructed from custom made extruded
aluminium sections, machined and anodised
to a high finish to enable the massive 4mm
thick top and bottom panels to be bolted to
the front, rear and side panels. Using
countersunk stainless steel screws thereby
forming an extremely rigid and smooth
structure, the Destiny amp is enormously
strong. To damp the effects of vibration from
possibly affecting the sonic performance,

custom moulded Sorbothane

TM

feet have
been fitted isolating the case and its
contents from a shelf or mounting platform.

Reliability

To allow good ventilation and reliability, the
Destiny amp uses large custom heatsinks
for each channel together with significant
areas of ventilation slots on the top and
bottom of the case. Being an all aluminium
construction, the whole case will eventually
become warm, as it radiates the heat
generated by both amplifier circuits. Large
solid aluminium disc feet are a new feature
of the Destiny design which also increases
the space underneath for air flow.

Sonic Values

Improvements to the layout and wiring of the
Destiny amplifier has made a substantial
improvement to the sonic performance,
when compared to the illustrious 5350SE.

The decision to retain the motorized 27mm
high grade ALPS 'Blue Velvet' volume
potentiometer, instead of using a more
popular digital volume control contributes
significantly to its superb performance.
Loudspeaker connection is now via 8 gold
plated, touch-proof, 4mm style, high current
binding posts.

The Destiny Amp has the unusual feature of
allowing the user to choose between a
sonically perfect passive (no gain)
pre-amplifier and a high precision, active
pre-amplifier. The active st age, which uses a
Burr-Brown OPA-2134 precision Op-Amp for
each channel, has the added feature of a
+3dB, +6dB or +9dB gain boost, user
selectable with a 3 way slider switch,
located on the underside of the pre-amp
section.

To further enhance the performance the
Destiny’s pre-amp and power amplifier can
be joined and separated by a push button
switch, recessed behind the rear panel.
Signal paths, to and from the pre and power
amplifier internally, are carried by audio
grade shielded cables.

Special Features

A new feature for the Destiny amp is low­current standby operation. To achieve this,
the amp has a constantly powered, small
toroidal transformer and power supply
dedicated to running the microcontroller and
all its digital circuitry. If all protection
conditions are satisfactory, a high current
relay will connect the mains voltage to the
amplifier's power transformer, to power-up
the amplifier and all other analogue circuitry.

To expand the control of the Destiny product
range, a custom Creek bus system is in
design to allow the user to connect to a
(RS232 style) room controller. Creek plans
to introduce such a device in 2006, however
proprietary types are also suitable. Serial
RJ45 connections are found on the rear of
the Destiny range products.

Most types of dynamic headphones can be
connected to the standard size ¼" jack
socket on the front panel, for high
performance reproduction.

The Destiny integrated amplifier is
supplied with Creek's new system
remote handset providing full control
for all Creek products.

Modular Options

A new, modular plug-in feature allows
the Destiny amp to have a highly
flexible option for Aux Line input.

Firstly, there are dedicated Destiny balanced
input MM or MC Phono circuits available,
which exploit the balanced nature of Phono
cartridge wiring, to significantly improve
interference suppression and provide studio
levels of accuracy to the venerable vinyl disc
source. For digital enthusiasts, Creek plans
to offer a high-end 24 bit D to A converter to
allow the amp to accept SPDIF signals on
both Aux1 inputs. The Destiny amp will
automatically recognise which plug-in
feature has been installed and indicate this
on the front panel. The basic product comes
with a linking PCB that treats Aux1 as a line
level input.

Techno-babble

The Destiny's unique MOS-FET power amp
circuitry is an evolution of the design first
used by Creek products in 1993.
Improvements in the Destiny include the use
of SMT (Surface Mount Technology) to
reduce the size and space of the amplifier
circuitry and improve the layout. This allows
the signal path and amplification to be
located on the top layer of the circuit board
and the power supplies and ground plane to
be located on the bottom layer. 'Dual Mono'
layout and construction and a massive
300VA low noise toroidal transformer with
separate windings for the pre-amp and
power amp circuitry has greatly improved
the performance. In addition, the left and
right channels now have their own low
impedance DC power supplies, fed from two
separate Shottky Barrier diode bridge recti­fiers and multi-capacitor reservoirs, totalling
20,000 microFarads. This allows the
Destiny to output more than 100 Watts per
channel into an 8 Ohm load, both channels
driven and a massive 200 Watts into 4
Ohms, one channel driven. Input selection
is now performed by a separate relay for
each of the 5 line inputs plus the single tape
loop. Input selection is visibly indicated by
LED's which have four, user adjustable,
brightness levels.

Protection Modes

Protection of the amplifier and ancillary
products under fault conditions is facilitated
by an array of sensors and measurement
circuits feeding-back information to the
microcontroller that monitors the amplifier
constantly for over-temperature, over­current, DC offsets, power supply status and
over-drive situations. If any of these
conditions is exceeded the micro will take
the appropriate corrective action. This can
include, muting the input signal, separating
the speaker outputs and, in extreme cases,
switching off the mains supply to the power
amplifier circuitry.

Destiny Integrated Amplifier