BAT Thoughts.....

I tried a BAT32 pre for a day in my system. It raised the room temperature 15 degrees. Way too hot for Texas! It also blew a tube and I returned it to the understanding seller (local sale) because I didn't want to mess with tube issues. I guess I am a confirmed SS guy despite my brief forays into tube stuff. I am running a Pass XP10 now-- tubelike sound with class A solid state reliability and quality. It's a beautifully built and engineered preamp. Warm in sound but not temp!!

My first really high-end system consisted of the following:

BAT VK-500 Amp
Two VK-60 Monoblock amps
BAT VK-50SE Preamp
BAT VK-D5SE

The temprature in my room would reach 100+ degrees within an hour or so. It was unbearable. To say that BAT gear runs hot is an understatement!

Besides frequent tube replacements, heat wreaks its havoc on other surrounding circuitry as well.

BTW... I'm in the "Sunburn State."... but we have a new thing here that helps us get thru our nine month summers....

Air conditioning.

I enjoy it, but don't enjoy paying for it.

I can place my hand over the top of my current tube preamp and hold it there a very very long while, I can do nearly the same thing with those Dodd MK IIs blocks, just to a tad lesser degree.

There are mini fans designed to run near silent or silent indeed and cool off such appliances. I've seen them and seen them talked about here in the forums.

Some appear to be small enough to attach to a rack, or reside nearby and should help immensely.

The coolest running amp I've ever owned was/is the Odyssey Stratos. By Far. Maybe the newer Stratos mono blocks or whatever Odyssey is calling their top tier blocks these days will run similarly.

I could use it as a pillow if it would just fluff up more.

It is true that the tube amps do run hot... about half of their standby power is actually in filament supplies!

Big tubes have big filaments. That is why they can deliver current pulses of several amps with ease.

Regarding the total power dissipation, it is about 500W per unit. Which is about 1700 BTU. From there a calculation can be made in terms of air conditioner load.

Tube life in units like VK-60 is not really an issue. There is some percentage of power tubes that fail early due to internal arcing, about 3-4% overall, but average tubes typically last several years.

There is also no thermal stress on internal components, they run very cool, due to design derating and strong chimney effect. Therefore after 15 years of production we are still not seeing any amps failing due to overheating. Usually the problems are related to random component failures, or foreign objects in the units - heavy accumulation of dust and pet hair among the most common.

Regards,

Victor Khomenko