Thanks all, best $1k I ever spent.
Tried tubes and LOVED it, now what?
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- 21 posts total
@charles1dad you really make an excellent point on how much of a difference coupling caps provide. @nasaman I certainly echo Charles’ view on coupling caps. Along those lines, I’d prefer you upgrade to a superior platform first. Then, dial in the tubes and coupling capacitors as time passes. I’m sure you’re right about that YT video of the Air Tight and B&W bookshelf loudspeakers. Cayin really made some excellent amplifiers. But I believe when you move to something like an Air Tight, Jadis, VAC, etc., you land on a destination piece, and those products will make that apparent to you in short order. In other words, you buy something that’s meaningfully different from the vast majority of what’s out there. Once there, you can maximize performance around that platform. In terms of reliability, as someone who’s owned a DA60 for more than a decade along with two other integrateds from the company, I can say the Jadis DA60 or DA88S come in about as rugged as anything you’ll find. I had to put mine in order when I bought it, but it provided me a laughably cheap on-ramp to the amplifier. After I fixed it, I’ve never encountered an issue. Like so many tube amplifiers, apart from the chassis and the Jadis transformers they wind themselves, and set them apart, every component on the amplifier is something you can easily source from any of the ubiquitous parts suppliers. And like 99% of tube amplifiers outside of the SET world, it uses the Mullard long-tail pair driver circuit, nothing unusual, difficult to understand, or work through. Finding a tech to get it back on the road should prove no trouble. But I want to say the same thing about the Air Tight and the VAC products, though I believe the latter employs printed circuit boards, which some may consider a bit more "proprietary" in terms of a design than a hardwired product, but still more than workable |
The Cayin a88-T looks nice. My 300B SET: https://goo.gl/YR5bTT full setup: https://goo.gl/y3Ykc4 What are you after SQ, analog tinkering? Do you usually run it in triode mode? I’ve spent a pretty penny on cables and tubes with very subjective results. I haven’t changed any internal electric components but some LED resistors are on the list to turn down their brightness as is a larger cap for increasing the warm up. Big results came by adding a MiniDSP HD for controlling phase and splitting lows to a sub w/ the tubes handling the rest... if you’re going for full analog it may not suit, but dang sound good to me (miniDSP + sub). Also depending on the type of audio you listen to, the 18Hz of your amp may not be deep enough. |
It is always a pleasure to hear from someone finding something new that they really like, particularly when I share the sentiment. I think that whatever direction you go from here, it will take listening to a wide variety of alternatives because there really is no such thing as a "tube" sound; there is a wide variety of sounds generated by tube gear and the "extremes" in tube gear are much wider apart than the extremes in top end solid state. Tube gear will vary from being very rich and somewhat lacking in "detail" or sharp attack of hard transients or it may be just the opposite and can sound far more brittle and edgy than almost any solid state stuff. It is a matter of finding what you like and what fits your set of components. There is a lot of good advice above about staying with what you have, at least for now, and trying different tubes and certain upgraded parts. My only caveat on the parts is that one should not necessarily expect an "improvement" by dropping in expensive parts--each part has a particular "voice" that may or may not be the direction you want to take. The necessity for experimentation, and the relative ease in swapping parts in most tube gear may either be a source of fun and enjoyment, or extremely frustrating, it depends on your temperament and commitment to the chase. There are several broad areas that should be explored before you focus on a particular area (obsession). If you are not totally committed to a particular set of speakers, the exploration should involve hearing high-powered vs. low-powered tube gear. To me, the difference between a typical high-powered amp and a low-powered amp (under 10 watts) is wide and I like the low-powered stuff enough to accept the extreme limitation on the choice of speakers. There is also the matter of looking into single-ended vs. pushpull amps; I like examples of both, but, there are a lot of people that only like single-ended amps. There is another kind of amp--output transformerless (OTL) that is a MUST hear--they are extremely dynamic and immediate sounding in a way that no other type of amp, solid state or tube, can match. Good luck on the quest. |
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