As part of my fascination with vacuum tubes I am almost constantly laying out different amplifier chassis designs. I usually have between two and four different designs in process at any given time. This generally follows a very predictable pattern: design the amplifier schematic, choose a size and layout which is pleasing to the eye, then try to cram everything into the resulting (usually too small) chassis. It seems I am nothing if not predictable.

Because of this personal failing I am usually looking for component choices which are as small as possible. Which brings me to the point of this post; power filter chokes. I have gotten to the point where I simply will not build a tube amp power supply without one. There is too much benefit to performance to not have a good choke in the main filter. There is only one problem, chokes tend to be big. Continue reading →

Sometimes when you’ve been working on technical stuff and just listening to music in the background you can kind of forget why we do what we do. Then there are times like right now. I just reached deep down in my music collection and put on the original 1984 mix of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Couldn’t Stand the Weather“. Now I’m listening to 8 minutes of Stevie doing the Hendrix classic “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” through an all triode signal chain and I’ve got goose bumps it sounds so good.

If ever asked the question about why you do tubes, please let me recommend this demonstration. It’s truly awesome.

Recently I have been doing some experimentation with 6V6 power tubes. As I was looking over some old designs I realized that I really wasn’t designing the 6V6 power stages so much as picking values and hoping for the best. This led me to develop an entire set of operation data on operating the 6V6 in Single Ended Ultra Linear (SE-UL) mode. You can read the results here (http://www.cascadetubes.com/optimization-of-the-6v6-se-ul-amp/) or over on the DIYAudioProjects site (http://diyaudioprojects.com/Technical/6V6-SE-UL-Bias-Optimization/). But it also got me thinking more generally about a common problem we all share, a general lack of resources to support the vacuum tube circuit design process. Continue reading →

I’ve been working on a new SET amplifier design. It’s a modern (well at least more modern) approach to an all triode signal chain with a relatively high power output (about 7.5w into the output transformer). But there’s a catch, I’ve never personally used this power tube before and there really isn’t much information about it floating around the internet. You see, instead of going with some huge transmitter output tube like the 211 or an over hyped DHT like the 2A3 or the 300B, I took a different approach. I decided on a very linear, high power, pass triode; the 6336A. Continue reading →

I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about about required amplifier output power. People who advocate low power single ended (SE) amplifier designs often get a bad time about the low output power of their amps. Due to the nonstop marketing forces of the consumer audio equipment industry over the last 40 years, most people think that 25W to 50W per channel is the absolute minimum acceptable power for any “decent” audio amplifier. They have been told repeatedly that this type of power is required to get any volume out of your system. But is this really true? Most of the are SE tube amps are from one to four watts peak output power. This seems totally inadequate to the “well marketed” masses but in reality, it’s much more power than you’d think. Matched to appropriate speakers, in a normally sized room, these amps can put out a surprising volume level and very dynamic sound. So let’s investigate how this could be. Continue reading →

In my post on how much audio bandwidth was really required, I posited that there was not sufficient benefit to justify the impacts of pushing the low end frequency response of our tube amps down to 20Hz. As part of that post I included the following statement.

“In order to pass really low frequencies the primary inductance of the output transformer must be rather large. Now the difference in frequency between 20Hz and 40Hz is a full octave. This means that a transformer designed to pass 20Hz at the same level as one designed to pass 40Hz must have a primary inductance which is twice as large. This equates to a much larger and more expensive coil and also introduces complexities at the upper end due to interwinding capacitances. This drives one to rather expensive solutions.” Continue reading →

After you’ve been building audio gear for a while you begin to acquire all sorts of miscellaneous test equipment and I am no exception. So today I was looking at a couple of audio function generators that I use to test amps and preamps. One is a relatively modern Tenma 72-455 and the other an older vacuum tube unit; a Precision model E-310. Neither of these units have been calibrated in all the time that I’ve owned them except for some rough checks involving a speaker and a tuning fork. So today I began thinking about calibration. Continue reading →

There is an ongoing debate in audio circles about just how much frequency response is really required from an audio system. Different systems for different uses may have vastly different requirements. The audio response required for a media room amplifier where various sound effects, explosions, noises, as such must be accurately reproduced may be far different that that required for orchestral music or jazz listening in a study or living room. So the pertinent question becomes, “For what conditions do we design?”. Continue reading →

So I get the question all the time “Why tubes?”. I usually answer something along the lines of “I just like them” but that really doesn’t sum it up that well. So I have been thinking about that very question; “Why tubes?”. After much contemplation, I think I have come up with one simple answer that sums up my feelings on the topic quite succinctly:

Why tubes?

Because vacuum tubes are like MOSFETs, but with class!

So whenever you go out to an audio equipment forum on the web, inevitability the topic of discussion will turn to resistors. This is especially true on vacuum tube audio forums. And the discussion always seems to come down to two entrenched camps; the Carbon Composition guys and the Metal Film guys. The Carbon Composition guys always claim that metal film resistors make equipment sound “sterile”, “dry”, or “cold”. The Metal Film guys counter with the fact that carbon composition resistors are noisy producing “hiss”, “pops”, “ticks”, or just “white noise”. And then the fight is on. Continue reading →

There is just something about it. The glow of the filaments, the warmth of the glass, and the full rich sound. It’s about the simple purity of circuits allowed to operate as designed without the strictures and totalitarian controls of overly tight control loops and massive feedback.

It’s about something that has been lost in modern electronics. Lost in the sterile specifications, the compromises of cost, return on investment, producibility, and marketing. Lost in the squared off metal boxes, the stark lights of LEDs, and the obsession with numbers having nothing to do with the way it sounds.

And it’s about rediscovery. Finding once again the sound that we didn’t even know we had lost, until finally, by chance, we heard it once again.