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Tube stereo sounds -smaller- after being on

Ok here is a weird one. I’ve been into tube audio for the last 20 years or so and I have one system I leave as is and one system I mess around with and change things out. For the most part, these days, I’m happy with both. Except I’ve been noticing something I thought I was imagining. Which is my experimental system starts out sounding great and after being on for a couple of hours sounds worse. Small soundstage, compressed highs and lows. Just over all enh. I have two turntables -

Gates and an EMT 930. The mixer is a great sounding one hand built in Austrailia called a Condesa Lucia. The amp is a Line Magnetics 2a3 amp LM 217. The cartridges are an EMT and a Denon 102. The tt preamps are by sun valley and auditorium 23. The one thing I can think of is the amp is a 220 version and goes through a power converter. Perhaps this is a sonic wrecker when it gets hot. Any other ideas? Thank you. 

yaluaka

Showing 1 response by carlsbad

carlsbad's avatar
carlsbad
1,551 posts
 

A couple of suggestions.  I'd first swap out the tubes and see if that made a difference.  Tubes heat up and generally the changes are good but not always.  Not saying this is it but an obvious thing to try.  

On your power converter and electrical system feel it and see if anything is getting warmer than you would expect.  As copper heats up its resistance goes up putting it into a positive feedback loop.  So it could be something in your power circuit is undersized.   

I have a 240V tube amp made in Europe.  I run it on 240 from my home panel.  You could consider installing a 240V outlet for it and eliminating the power converter.  I did experiment with my amp and ran it successfully from a transformer style power converter.  It was hard to find one that didn't hum.  I also oversized by a factor of 5.  If your amp is 200W, buy at least a 1000W rated transformer. 

Jerry

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