What are your thoughts on reducing the bias a bit on the voltage?
Your journey with lower-watt tube amps -- Can a kit be good enough?
Looking for stories about your low-watt amp journeys.
Here's the situation: I have new speakers, 97 db. Trying them with lower watt tube amps (45/211, 300b, etc) seems generally wise. I am attempting to borrow some from audiophiles in the area.
The horizon beyond trying these things involves actually buying some. I'm looking at a budget limit of about $5k.
Curious as to folks' experience with lower-watt amp kits vs. those of good makers (e.g. Dennis Had, etc.).
If you have any thoughts about the following, I'd be interested:
Did you start out with a kit and then get dissatisfied? Why?
Did you compare kits vs. pre-made and find big differences?
Did you find you could get the equivalent level of quality in a kit for much less than the same pre-made version? How about kit vs. used?
Also: did you find there was a difference between "point to point wiring" vs. "PCB" in these various permutations?
I realize that there are good kits and bad ones, good pre-made amps and bad ones. I'm hoping you'll be comparing units which seem at comparable levels of quality and price-points.
Thanks.
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- 149 posts total
@rankaudio The power tubes can handle it well enough. But that will affect the distortion signature of the amp but by how much is hard to say.
@hilde45 Doing so will change the feedback since the loop gain of the amp will be reduced. You may actually wind up with higher distortion; partially because the EL84 is normally an easy tube to drive; as a triode it will be harder so the driver circuit is likely to make more distortion of its own on this account. The ST35 employs ultra-linear operation in its output transformers, which allows the power tubes to have linearity approaching that of triodes (and in some cases, having exactly the linearity of triodes). So my thoughts are this will be detrimental. If you really want to find out what the EL84s and the Dynaco transformers can do I recommend getting a different chassis like this one and building up a different circuit on that. If I were to do something like that I'd arrange a 12AT7 as a differential amplifier to drive the power tubes instead, with possibly a constant current source for the power tubes as well as one for the input tube.
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@atmasphere I'll convey that to Mike and see what he says. Thank you. |
@atmasphere Here's what Mike said: "It will almost certainty raise both the harmonic and intermodulation distortion in triode mode and drastically reduce the power, but it may be pleasant distortion." It will be switchable, so if it doesn't sound nice on the speakers, we'll switch it back. Gotta experiment, right? |
- 149 posts total