Best Balanced Tube Amp To Pair With Meridian G02?

Nightfall, thanks for your comments. 10X10 is a small room; it sounds like you don't need a lot of power. What I would recommend, if you liked our amps, is maybe an S-30, and a set of ZEROs.

http://www.zeroimpedance.com

Just FWIW... It is an easy task to add a true balanced connection to nearly any amplifier. Now before y'all go off on me, keep in mind that I am associated with balanced amps and preamps, and that I have good reason for saying what I did.

I am **not** talking about a simple XLR connector, that is only hooked up to the RCA input, nor am I talking about an input transformer. The mod is simple and inexpensive, so if you want, your range of tube power amps suddenly got a lot larger if you are willing to have the mod installed. It will not affect the sound of the amp otherwise.

With just about any amplifier it would be under $250.00.

With tube amplifiers, normally the grid of the input tube is driven by the input signal. Since we want to do balanced (because it sounds better), we will have an inverted signal to work with as well. That is applied to the cathode of the same tube through a coupling capacitor (which might also be the cathode bypass cap of the amp; lacking that, then one is added as the coupling cap).

For transistor amps, the extra input is mixed with the feedback signal, which is usually applied to the differential input of the amplifier.

Both techniques work quite well, and essentially in the same way. It requires the connector, and the connections into the circuitry, perhaps a coupling cap or resistor. Otherwise you can see that this is an inexpensive mod; in either case **the amplifier is accepting the balanced input in the differential domain** even if the amp is otherwise single-ended.

And FWIW, I disagree with Rrog, its **much** easier to find a neutral-sounding tube preamp than solid state! However I find that listener bias does apply; I regard a preamp with a deep and wide soundstage to be more neutral than one that lacks such a thing, similarly I regard a preamp without brightness as more neutral than one that is bright.

However, I have since been told that your amplifiers only perform optimally when linked with one of the preamps of your own design, unfortunately.

Most of the reviews you might have seen on our amps have been done for the most part with single-ended preamps. The amps don't care if the preamp is single-ended or balanced, however its a fact that balanced cables, if driven properly, will sound better for their own reasons. So by default the amps will sound better when driven by a balanced source and our preamps *are* balanced, but the amps are designed to work with **any** preamp.

Nightfall, there is another alternative. Its possible to operate our amps with less than the full complement of power tubes. So if you have a set of M-60s, you could run them with 4 or 6 power tubes instead of 8.

The M-60 was also made in the long chassis. It was known as the M-60 MkII.3.

Ckoffend, you can usually run the amp with half the power tubes. Its a good idea to derate one of the power fuses but that is easy- just change the fuse. This is not something you can do with any tube amp BTW.

The tubes are inexpensive since they do not require matching.

Clio09, the circuit you described is for a phase splitter in an amplifier. What I was talking about is something different.

For example, usually you are driving such a circuit with a single-ended voltage amplifier. The mod I mentioned is to that voltage amplifier.

I think that the reason no-one is using this circuit is that they don't know that they can. I've done it a bunch of times and it always works...