Allnic OTL/OCL Phono vs Allnic DHT

Ralph, As phono stages go, OCL is more unusual than OTL, of course. I thought that was salient to my point. As the owner of an MP1, I know about the OCL/OTL linestage section, but the built in phono is capacitor coupled to the linestage, at least in my unit.

You can't have heard it before, because to my fairly extensive knowledge, this is the first such product (OTL/OCL phono stage).  However, OTL tube amplifiers have been around since the 1950s (Futterman) and have always been a minority species, my favorite for driving any high impedance speaker but particularly for ESLs.  In fact, I have been using OTL tube amps to drive ESLs since the mid1970s.  Tube OTL headphone amplifiers are also not new; the first one I heard was designed and marketed by Futterman in the 60s. This is easier to do because the typical headphone has a very high input impedance compared to any speaker.

It's a bit ironic to have a phono stage that uses SUTs to step up gain and then sports an OTL/OCL output as a major asset. But I like Allnic too.

The idea of an OTL/OCL phono stage intrigued me, so I looked up this Allnic product.  At $45,000 retail, you are not apt to find too many, except dealers, who have compared it to their DHT phono stage, which also costs well into the 5-figure range.  Anyway, to do away with both a transformer and capacitor for coupling, the unit must use some sort of servo mechanism to cancel DC offset at its output.  This has been done before, a few times, with OTL tube amplifiers. The servo itself then can become an issue, either for coloring the sound or for developing faults in its operation.  However, I have faith that Mr Park can get around such problems.

No transformer ought to be better than even a very good transformer or a very good capacitor, so your observations don’t surprise me. I’d like to find out more about the OTL unit.