Sorry, have been absent from this thread for quite some time. Not spending too much time on here. I will be in Dallas at the SW Audio Fest next weekend in the Spatial Audio room and the Raven and Blackbirds will be driving their best open baffle speaker. So if anyone wants to chat.....
@theclipper
There are 3 or 4 sets of the final production Blackbirds in the world. One is probably still in the boxes (go figure) as the person was building a new house or some such. There is one guy who loves his and posted on the spatial audio circle I believe. There are a few sets of the prototype ones in the smaller chassis with 6V6 drivers floating around and people like them. But no one is really active on chat boards. C'est la vie. A review pair will make its way into someone's hands this year most likely. The Raven preamp has had more people posting because it costs less and there are around 30 of the production ones out in the real world.
As for my history with tube amps... I helped my older brother with his Dynaco kits when I was about 8 or 9. Then I got on to the SS bandwagon with everyone else of my generation, but I never forgot how that Dynaco gear sounded on my brother's AR speakers with AR XA turntable. I built various SS kits in my youth... anyone remember SW Technical Products? Then Hafler kits, preamp and amps and learned to mod them. Then had kids..... I finally bought another tube amp in about 2004 or so, a modded Jolida integrated and it sounded far better than my Krell integrated that I had at the time. Then I started restoring vintage tube gear, met Jim McShane, became his main tech and restored probably 500 pieces of vintage tube gear including probably 75 citation II amps and 40 or so citation I preamps. Plus tons of Macs, Sherwoods, Marantz, Fisher, etc... Learned a lot about circuits and started making my own gear.
I think @atmasphere has fooled around with MANY vintage tube pieces as well as I gather. You learn a lot.... And here we are today...... So many tubes, so many circuits, so little time. Always room for personal taste and disagreements. That's wonderul as long as all folks are polite, and this thread is testament to that!
As for the driver tube on the Blackbirds... It has a huge effect on the sonics of the amp. I didn't try an EL34 because over the years I have heard many EL34 amps and never liked that tube compared to a good 6V6, 6L6, or KT66, KT77, KT88. We all have our taste. I tried a number of those and the KT88 was best by a good margin to my ear. I have some rather esoteric DHTs as drivers in my own Blackbirds, but you have to find matched pairs and they are not in modern production, which is what you need for commercial production of tube gear. I happen to have good sources and good stocks of these tubes, but again you want the customer to be able to buy tubes that are in modern production from more than one source. There are exceptions to that rule of course, but you better have a good stock of tubes available if not using current production. So the Blackbird uses tubes you can easily buy without me (or Spatial Audio) being involved. I am not into the "find a vintage tube, use it, buy a 1000 of them and then mark them up 100%" model of business. The exception is that we use the VR tubes, but those are everywhere and cheap. Flea bay has millions and they last a long time. Same with damper diode tubes.
