Ralph has had enough trouble, financially, without my compounding it! But I appreciate your concern and comments, Howie. We Atma-Sphere owners are blinded by the sheer brilliance of the design and sound, and will go to any lengths to keep them and not blame the designer:)I would rather change speakers than amp, if push came to shove. Hopefully, by checking all my tubes regularly, which Andy at Vintage Tubes will do, this won't happen again. All I need do now is replace the driver without burning it during soldering. I would rather just put a crocodile clamp on it but doubt the contact will be good enough (see thread under speakers)
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.
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- 21 posts total
- 21 posts total