300b lovers

Weirdly enough, both Thom Mackris and Don Sachs came up with the 6V6 driver within hours of each other. Thom was hacking around with his SET 300B amp and swapped in the 6V6 driver and was jumping up and down about it, and Don calls the same day. OK guys, you win, tell me how it’s going.

Thom plays electric guitar and has built his own guitar amp, as well as his 300B SET for his hifi system, so he’s really into tone. The 6V6 is famous throughout the guitar community for its tone. And Don’s a big fan of the 6V6 too. I’d been casting around for a replacement for the unobtainium 45 (in matched pairs no less), and both my friends say the same thing on pretty much the same day. And yes, Don and Thom chat on the phone on a regular basis. I think they have an ESP thing going.

This degree of insight is so interesting and appreciated. I do recall the introduction of the Galibier 300b SET a few years back. Three highly regarded audio veterans sharing thoughts, ideas and concepts. This is precisely why I believe that there will always be a place for high quality well implemented tube audio components. If done right, sublime sound is the successful result.

Charles 

In 22 years of membership here, reading this thread has provided more knowledge base and common sense, respect and integrity also come to mind, keep on track😉

I usually hang out at DIYaudio, and am the originator of the notorious "Beyond the Ariel" thread in the "Multi-way" speaker forum. Gary Dahl, my neighbor when I lived in Silverdale, Washington State, finally retired the thread when he built his own speaker system. What Thom Mackris and I are doing is a variant of Gary Dahl’s system. Most of the back-and-forth on the "multi-way" DIY forum is discussion about speakers, not amps. (You have to log on to see the graphs and illustrations.)

Brief description: 2-way high efficiency (97 dB/meter) large-format system, with Altec/GPA 416 Alnico-magnet 15" woofer, Athos Audio Yuichi A290 wood horn, 1.4" large-format compression driver, and a 4.2 cubic foot closed-box low-diffraction cabinet. Crossover will be 2nd-order at 700~800 Hz, with level-setting L-pad or tapped autoformer. The speaker is in same studio-monitor format as the 1938 Lansing Iconic, 1966 Altec Valencia, or 1978 Altec Model 19. Thom and I are having the bass module cabinets built here in Denver, and we have most of the other parts on hand.

As I am retiring from constant production of tube gear I wanted to see what was possible.  How good could it sound?  Lynn got me to look at the symmertic Reichert circuit and it looked interesting and off I went.  Then he showed me the Raven preamp circuit, which like that amp is deceptively simple at first glance, but there is a subtle complexity to both.  The Raven took some doing to get it to take XLR inputs as well as RCA and to do so with the remote contolled Khozmo attenuator that I favor in my previous preamp.  There were things to figure out.  We did the same dance with power supplies, building it several ways and then decided to combine both the modern regulated approach with the VR tubes.  The combination is quite astounding.  So all of this is about having fun and seeing what is possible.  I could build a DHT preamp with the 26 tube, but there are few to buy.  I kind of wanted to see how good a 6SN7 can sound, and the answer is exquisitely good if done right..... without all the hum potential and microphonics, and cost of the DHT apapproach.  So it is about balancing things, using tubes that are readily available and seeing what is possible.  Now someone else can build them in commercial quantity!