Showing posts with label amplifier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amplifier. Show all posts

Monday, June 24, 2019

SIT on it

Back in my younger days in Milwaukee I used to hang out with Arthur Fonzarelli drinking Shotz beer talking about music and all of the cool things in life.  Today we have the interwebs and these conversations now occur worldwide.  One of my good customers in Hong Kong was interested in some SIT (V-fet) amps and with curves like a triode I had to wonder why I have yet to hear a V-fet amp with a nice DHT sound.  I offered to do a pair of nanocrystalline cored transformers for the Tonkin 2SK180 and then things got a bit out of hand.  Here are three pair nano of outputs ready to be packed up.






I had the idea that maybe much of the lacking sound I have experienced from my limited exposure to amps with these "triode-esque" devices had to do more with the with the circuit than the devices. We figured the first place to start was the power supply which needed to be choke input with amorphous cored 250mhy 2.5A chokes.


Next came the issue of driving the ungodly 2.5nf of input capacitance these devices have.  Historically an active buffer and fixed bias is used and I figured it was best to go with what was known to work and suggested a 417A into a 49% nickel 4:1 stepdown transformer.  Then it was suggested that maybe a Telefunken RE404 could be used and of course 80% nickel too.  I had spice crunch some numbers and sure enough for this particular case the DHT would do it.  The problem became actually getting a wide bandwidth 200hy @10ma  4:1 done on an 80% core.   Since there will be Coleman regs on the filaments I figured why not run that 450ma of high impedance current through a tertiary winding on the 4:1 to null the current through the primary?


The resulting 4:1's have a 200hy inductance with a window of operation of 7-11ma and when all put together this amp should have -1dB points of just under 20hz to around 40Khz.   Bias for the 2A of output device current will be in the form of a 7-8 ohm source resistor and bypass cap.  In the future this can be compared to fixed bias through the transformer secondary.

Stay tuned...

Friday, April 19, 2019

EMIA Permalloy 50 Amplifier

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rarely seen and never blogged, the EMIA 50's made an appearance at the warehouse for some final tuning and listening this week... two amplifiers are shown... one copper, and one silver... yes, silver interstage transformer and silver outputs... 


and check out those ridiculously giant nickel outputs... no, not 49% nickel... actual Permalloy - 80%.... sometimes I forget how much I love the sound of nickel... especially when coupled to a globe 50... not sure it gets any better than that... different maybe, but not better... a true classic... 


and speaking of rarely seen in public together, last night this happened:


Nick Mason played all 1970 and earlier Pink Floyd tunes... so wonderful to hear all of those Syd Barrett songs... and they brought the swirling chaos as well... Astonomy Domine... Interstellar Overdrive... Saucerful of Secrets.... and Roger Waters came out to sing the only song I wanted him to sing:  Heart of the Sun.... just perfect..   oh! and on the way out I found the Saucerful of Secrets:


I love me some liquid lights!


peace,
me

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

ETF Preview - I rebuilt the breadboard...

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I mean, of course I did.... when the brilliant, kind, 
and open group that runs ETF asks you to bring an 
amp for the main room again, how can you say no?  
you can't... 






now back to soldering... getting excited... picking out 
rhythm and blues records, because you know Joe won't 
bring records... but hopefully he will bring the Dell 
Soundbar for listening back at the room... 




now to figure out how to fit this into a suitcase and get
through security...

peace,
me


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