2. amps-preamps
  3. 1102983150

Anybody blow a ceramic woofer with an OTL amp?

I would appreciate anybody's experience with transients (such as a tube blowing) in an OTL amp that results in breaking the ceramic driver in a Kharma 3.2. I just had this happen to me - a driver tube blew, terrible noise from the woofer and it broke. The Kharma distributor said this was only the second he had heard of with an Atma-Sphere amp, but that it was much more likely with an OTL amp because of the lack of transformer. Ralph is interested in the frequency with which this occurs, as he feels it only happens with ceramic woofers, which are much more likely to blow than non-ceramics. Have any other OTL owners had this happen to Kharmas? I guess the lesson is to keep testing tubes or keep a careful eye on them to prevent this happening, but I would like to know if this was a freak happening or more common than has been generally accepted? Judging from the number of Tenor-Kharma combos out there, it should be more common than I thought if the combination of OTL and ceramic woofers is a problematic one.
springbok10
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
I used tube circuitry for several decades and never had a tube "blow". In my experience when a tube "went bad" there were symptoms like audio distortion, noise, oscillation, blue glow and the like but never anything catistrophic.

One of the disadvantages of transistorized amps is that when they lose an output device bad things do happen. (Fortunately it is rare).
honest1
586 posts
 
When you say "pop (and really violently)...", do you mean the glass bottle actually explodes, sneding glass flying everywhere?
jax2
3,031 posts
 
I bet Paris Hilton's done that...wasn't it on that video tape?

Marco
larryi
3,992 posts
 
I am a bit leery of OTL's. I know that if a tube does fail, they will not actually pass D.C. because they are coupled by a capacitor, but still, I worry. A friend borrowed a Joule Electra OTL and it was subject to intermittent popping. On his horn system, popping meant a sound that rattled windows and could send someone into cardiac arrest.
tireguy
1,964 posts
 
Cinematic_systems- The drivers used are not stock accuton drivers, kharma modifies them in house. So your right its not expensive but it can be time consuming and difficult to find the right replacement driver.
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