atmasphere
Responses from atmasphere
| What Makes a Good RIAA or Line Stage? The idea that power supplies somehow compare to engines falls apart fairly easily. What if you have large capacitances *and* tight regulation for example?In addition to excellent power supplies, a good RIAA section will be low noise with as few st... | |
| Disconnecting speaker while power amp on - any dan Zormi, The load becomes infinite when the speakers are not hooked up. Its OK as long as there is no input signal to the amp. If there *is* an input signal, some amplifiers can be damaged, both tube and solid state.So if you disconnect the speaker,... | |
| Preamp output voltage...affect on volume??? In addition to the output voltages being different (the headroom is there to keep distortion down at the levels you *do* play BTW) the preamps also have different *gain*. The two are not the same, although it sounds like the unit with the higher v... | |
| joule electra vs. atma-sphere any input? Hi Siddh, Thanks for the nice comments! The MkII.2 dates from 1999 to about 2003; we've come a long way since then and are now building the MkIII amplifiers. It might be worth your while to audition again when you get the chance- the MkIIIs are sm... | |
| joule electra vs. atma-sphere any input? Hi Siddh, which version of the MkII did you have? | |
| What phono preamps are balanced Hdm, you got it spot on. In fact almost all cartridges are balanced sources, not just MC. I think the old Decca that had 3 leads was the only one that was not balanced- even ceramic cartridges can be run balanced, and most of the BSRs, Garrards , ... | |
| What phono preamps are balanced Just thought you might be interested in some history:We introduced the first balanced phono preamp in 1989- the MP-1. It is also fully differential and was the first all tube preamp that was fully differential from input to output. The EQ is handl... | |
| High impedance Speakers A speaker that is easy to drive (more efficient) requires less of the amplifier but also of *the preamp* as the volume does not run as high. As long as hysteresis loss does not play a role (as in a large transformer coupled tube amp) the distortio... | |
| Bridged amp with electrostatics.. The nature of ESLs is such that they have an impedance curve that decreases as frequency increases, causing a transistor amp to make more power in the highs. So you do want to be careful! | |
| Bridged amp with electrostatics.. You can run the speakers with the normal AC ground connection. The concern with most bridged amplifiers is that neither speaker terminal is at ground, so if you connect into a setup that does have one terminal grounded, a potential (pun intended :... | |
| Bridged amp with electrostatics.. Actually the 'bridge' issues is similar for transistor amps. With *any* bridged amp, both speaker terminals should be kept from ground.BTW, ESLs in general are best driven by tubes. If you plan to do it with transistors, you will need a much large... | |
| Bridged amp with electrostatics.. So are you looking for an amplifier that is based on a bridge circuit then?Atma-Sphere, BAT, Einstein, Joule Electra are a few that come to mind. | |
| Has anyone upgraded their preamp with V-caps? We've been using the V-Cap as an option for about the last year or year and a half. The Teflon part is one of the best coupling caps out there with no reservations. If you don't like what you hear with this cap its because it is revealing a weakne... | |
| I have Maggie MG 1.6's - need amp advice No Doubt!! Clipping any large amp will eat tweeters pretty fast.Although tube amps do have more THD in general, the idea is to generate less of the distortions the ear *objects* to, and tubes are quite good at that. This goes back to that 'tube po... | |
| What's the frequency response of vinyl? If any of you guys were alive in the 1970s :) remember the CD-4 system that RCA used for 4 channel? The LPs were cut as 2 channel records, but had the rear channels imposed on a 42KHz FM carrier that was *also* cut on the record. And this was with... |