OT: Show us your DIY tube amps

[RonSSS]

Ok, Designer of the Citation II. Multiple feedback loops. Beyond that, you lost me completely.

[LowOhms]

"BTW, off subject, I am a big fan of no loop feedback amps, for correct timing of music playback. That is heavenly on any high efficiency speaker. Write to me and I will respond.

LowOhms "

This I agree with. none of my amps have global feedback. Distortion, freq response stand on thier own merit. Although I prefer PP circuits.
SE, sorry, just not enough poop for the music and SPL's I like.

Ron

Hi Ron,

A P-P amp is a far easier task to design and DIY build, and P-P is forgiving to less than optimal executions.

In SE amps, the entire supply is IN the audio circuit, and it needs to be executed impeccably, which 99.99999 percent of existing SE amps ( and amp designers ) do not know how to do.

The P-P amp "messes" with the circuit too much. It has to split the phase 180 degrees, and then put it all back together, hopefully intact, at the P-P output transformer . Its a processor.

The SE amp does not have to invert the signal 180 degrees, and IF ( a big word ) the rest of the SE amp's execution is state of the art, then it will creme any P-P amp, easily. That is why we build em and use them on high efficiency speakers. Its a sub 2 Watt amp with about a 500 Watt "on-time" power supply, backing it up, zero negative feedback - of course. And its killer on Altecs.

I do NOT deny anyone's experience with P-P and SE Ron. I understand it fully.

I just wanted to share my very unusual experiences with any others who are open to DIY amp builds for Altec speakers. Cheers,

LowMu

[Alien_Shore]

Since I have some dynaco iron, I've been researching some designs, and came across this which looks really promising:

Jeff Yourison's El-Cheapo

[TubesNhorns]

A lot of tech talk in this thread. Here is my 2A3 SE amp running two tubes in parallel each channel. It was built by a gentleman by the name of Henry Hyde. Henry would not sell the amp while alive but left instructions in his will to sell it to me. The big iron is by Magnequest. I was working in Indonesia and went down to a small wood shop in a jungle village. Had them make this this custom hand carved cabinet out of a local variety of wood called 'iron wood' (not sure what it is). I dig the art deco look. I bi-amp using a big Crown for the low end. My technical observation about this amp is "sounds pretty good".

[GM]

A real 'beauty' inside and out! What's the rest of the sound system?

Iron wood is a fairly generic name for the collection of the world's densest/hardest woods with the original being native to the Sonoran Desert: Ironwood Information

FWIW, this list doesn't show any in Indonesia per se, so no clue what yours might be: Ironwood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

GM

[alancohen]

It's a beauty, but I'm not crazy about surrounding a tube amp in a wooden case. It can hold in too much heat. It looks like that baby needs to breathe.

[TubesNhorns]

I left the high efficiency arena a few years back and bought a set of Infinity Kappa 9's. These sound great in their own way but require the equivalent of several arc welders to drive them. I used two Hafler 9505 amps which are really quite impressive, to drive each speaker's HF and a Crown K2 for LF. The Crown puts out 1200 wpc at lower impedance and all three amps would clip at higher sound levels.

Now I'm dusting off the tube gear and have a nice 12A7 preamp that was built by the same gentleman who built my 2A3. Bought a variac and some used vintage tubes. Picked up a nice set of Santiagos on the cheap and have collected all the components to build a set of A-7's. Have a large stack of teak wood I brought back from Indonesia and has been curing for nearly 10 years, so who knows?

Next up- going green. I am assembling 12VDC components and solar cells for my solar powered system. I will make amends for the huge carbon footprint left by my old Infinities.

[Phil-G]

I left the high efficiency arena a few years back and bought a set of Infinity Kappa 9's. These sound great in their own way but require the equivalent of several arc welders to drive them. I used two Hafler 9505 amps which are really quite impressive, to drive each speaker's HF and a Crown K2 for LF. The Crown puts out 1200 wpc at lower impedance and all three amps would clip at higher sound levels.

Now I'm dusting off the tube gear and have a nice 12A7 preamp that was built by the same gentleman who built my 2A3. Bought a variac and some used vintage tubes. Picked up a nice set of Santiagos on the cheap and have collected all the components to build a set of A-7's. Have a large stack of teak wood I brought back from Indonesia and has been curing for nearly 10 years, so who knows?

Next up- going green. I am assembling 12VDC components and solar cells for my solar powered system. I will make amends for the huge carbon footprint left by my old Infinities.

ooooohhhh teak. definately measure twice cut once