atmasphere
Responses from atmasphere
| Passive preamp vs. powered If the designer of the preamp line stage has done his homework, that preamp will sound better than any passive made. Passives cannot control the interconnect cable and that is one thing that a good line section **can** do (although not all preamp ... | |
| Best Balanced Tube Preamplifier Pedrillo, I would expect that any balanced preamp, tube or solid state, should drive any balanced power amp made. I would not worry about that! | |
| What phono preamps are balanced Pedrillo, I ran my Graham in balanced mode. Pin 3 of the tone arm connector is ground. I was able to use the same cable that I did for my SME V. | |
| Are 6as7g tubes becomming harder to find? Hiendmmoe, the importer of Russian 6AS7Gs got to be too difficult to deal with. We saw the price double in a 3 month period several times. The Chinese 6AS7G has been in production for the same length of time (since the early 1960s). All the Chines... | |
| How to convert VPI turntable to banlanced? Mordante, no worries. FWIW, though, I don't think people buy our stuff because its tubes. They seem to be buying because its transparent and neutral. Also, the preamps were designed as stand-alone phono reproducers. They have the bare minimum to m... | |
| Linestage needed Richard, are you needing the balanced feature? | |
| How to convert VPI turntable to banlanced? Mordante, we've been making balanced phono preamps for over 20 years. | |
| 6L6 or 300B or 2A3? My speakers are 97 db (Classic Audio Loudspeakers T-3) and I find 30 watts to be about the minimum, but I like to listen at higher volume levels (95db peaks).A 45-based SET makes about 1 watt. You will have about 10% distortion at that power level... | |
| SET with inefficient speakers Magfan, you got that right... I usually show the speaker guys thishttp://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html-and then see if they have any questions. If the question about which paradigm group the speaker or amp fell into was marked on... | |
| How loud do you like to play your music? I listen a lot based on the volume that one would expect if the music was live. So with Wagner- peaks around 110, but ELP's first LP I'll have dialed back a bit to peaks at 100-105. Solo guitar is then at 75. In order to play these volumes comfort... | |
| Next step: tube pre or tube power amp? Stevecuss, since your source is a hard drive then you don't really need an integrated since your DAC will provide plenty of output (although you should probably keep the interconnect cables short). Plus your speakers are an easy load for almost an... | |
| MC Load Resistance A slight bit closer to topic... Dertonearm, your description of the difference between hybrid and all-tube cascode is very similar to how I would have described it.There are a number of manufacturers that use semiconductors right at the input of t... | |
| Tube balanced preamp for class D amp? Simontju, as far as we know, Atma-Sphere offered the first balanced line products for high end audio, in the form of a fully-differential balanced-line tube preamp. One of the founders of BAT was a customer of ours before going into business for h... | |
| MC Load Resistance Lewm, FWIW in working with the Jensens we notice more degradation when they are set for the higher stepup ratios and almost none at the lowest stepup. (Jensens have multiple windings that allow a variety of combinations for different stepup ratios... | |
| MC Load Resistance Allen, a peak past 'audibility' will have effects not unlike a tube without grid stoppers, exhibiting oscillation; IOW it can behave as if there is excessive ultrasonic energy. This can cause some preamps (not all) to exhibit excessive ticks and p... |