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Stereophile - MF Supercharger article-add 550W/ch.

Have you read this article in september issue of Stereophile?
It says that Supercharger pumps up your system to 550W/ch. and leaves "no sonic signature" - "Like a chameleon".

It works like this - simply connect Supercharger between your power (or integrated) amp and speakers.You only need a new set of very short speaker cables.You get 550 W/ch.,better dynamics and bass, and everything else is the same.
It is claimed that it only increases dynamics, and doesn't change "the sound" of your original amplifier.

Without questioning Stereophile's knowledge (it is my favorite magazine) i just find it hard to believe this.
My question - has anyone actually tried adding supercharger to the SET based system,2-20 Watts of primary amp. power?
And can any owner of such SET system say it didn't damage (a bit at least) the magic and "the sound" of SET tubes?
I am aware that in article Scott 299B(18 W/ch.) amp was connected with Supercharger.
I want to hear from owners of SET based systems who have tried this.Or from other people who have some opinion on this subject.I just find this hard to believe.
audiobb
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
12,032 posts
 
db, don't think for a minute that transistor amps don't have colorations too! My experience is that it is a rare transistor amp that does not also sound like transistors- I can count them on one hand. No wonder that a 'tube-like' sound is used as a complement in reviews of well-received transistor amplifiers

Tubes more closely mimic the rules of human hearing, and while they often have more distortion (not always mind you), they have less of the distortions that the human ear objects to: odd ordered of the 5th harmonic and beyond. The human ear can distinguish these harmonics in vanishingly small amounts.

In this case, the supercharger concept is alluring because you could potentially have a setup that has small tube amp sonic properties along with high power. The 'supercharger' adds its own colorations of odd-ordered harmonics of the type I just described, and its easily heard. Re-read my earlier comments in this context and you will have a clearer idea of what I was talking about.
cjfrbw
148 posts
 
Although it is probably similar to using a tubed preamp as a driver, the concept does make some sense. Although something is going to be changed in the translation, the article states that the interface between the driving tube amp and the MF amp is optimised, more so than the tube amp driving a pile of caps and coils through a crossover. This would help, so I think that it might work to get a pretty nice sound aka "Hybrid" sound and would be great to try with a 2 watt 45 based SET amp.
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dbphd
1,631 posts
 
Atmasphere,

My previous post was intended mainly to pull the chain of the anlog folks, but it does have some rationale.

My doctorate was in psychoacoustics, my post doc in binauaral processing, but how tubes mimic human hearing escapes me. I think of tubes as introducing a distortion that many find pleasant, a rosey sonic picture if you will. As a lab rat (grad student), one of my jobs was to test and match pairs of 6L6 and KT88 tubes for the many Mac MC 60 amps in the lab. A big box of tubes and a tube tester was not my idea of fun.

db
darkmoebius
900 posts
 
Along the same lines, check out the 6Moons review of Nelson Pass's First Watt F4 current drive amplifier. 50wpc stereo, 110wpc balanced monoblocks. Although, the design can easily be scaled up or down from that output.

In the review, Srajan runs a couple of SET amplifiers into the F4 and compares the sound with the SET's/F4 on their own.
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
12,032 posts
 
Hi Dbphd, the way that tubes operate closer to the rules of human hearing is through the lack of odd-ordered harmonics, which comes from greater linearity and less need for feedback. Feedback runs counter to the rules of human hearing (i.e. adds high order odd harmonics).

Human hearing uses high-order odd harmonics as a way to measure loudness. Our ears are so sensitive to these harmonics that fractions of a percent is easily audible. We hear them as a 'sheen', 'hardness', 'clinical', 'brittle' or 'chalky' quality in the reproduction.
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