lynn_olson
Responses from lynn_olson
| 300b lovers Glad you’re enjoying it! As I might have mentioned earlier, in person or in this forum, I’ve been listening to the Karna/Blackbird amps for twenty years. It’s just what an amp sounds like to me. But the PAF is the first time I ever heard what my ... | |
| 300b lovers Let me tell the story about how misreading a graph almost bankrupted a company. This is a true story. Our chief engineer, a Tektronix veteran, designed a power amplifier called the Point Zero Three, or PZ3 (hey, I didn’t name it, OK?). A 100-wat... | |
| 300b lovers I’m always interested in boundary conditions ... what happens when the amp leaves its happy place and a surge of current or voltage is required. Does a circuit saturate and hit the wall? Does a transistor fail? Does it store charge and "stick" for... | |
| 300b lovers Quick recap: actually, vacuum tubes are far from saturation when set to normal bias points. Look at a 300B, or any other power tube. Normal quiescent bias is set between 60 and 85 mA, if Class A operation is desired. If Class AB is desired, 35 to ... | |
| 300b lovers From my perspective as an amp designer (not as a consumer or reviewer), the Sweet Spot in tube amps is from 3 watts (Class A SET) to 60 watts (Class AB PP pentode). These are all simple circuits with an emphasis on sound quality and reliability. ... | |
| 300b lovers By the way, if you are looking for value, you really should audition the Valhalla from Spatial. It took on every other high-bucks big-name tube amp at the show and came out ahead, often by a good margin. It is a seriously good amplifier at an absu... | |
| 300b lovers A bit of background on cost to the consumer: if a company isn’t charging Bill of Materials (BOM) cost times four, they won’t be around very long, one or two years at most. This rule-of-thumb has been true since the Fifties (for hifi manufacturing ... | |
| 300b lovers The Karna Mk II/Blackbird is bit by bit evolving towards the original Karna, but without the madness of a four chassis design. Having a separate chokes and power transformers for #1 B+, #2 B+, and the filament supply gets really heavy and awkward.... | |
| 300b lovers I guess the micro-rant above is about audiophile components where the case costs more than the parts in the audio circuit. It doesn’t make sense to have a $500 case housing $50 worth of parts (in the audio circuit), unless the look is the main rea... | |
| 300b lovers Due to package heat-dissipation limitations, most op-amps operate in Class AB. Now, they have a stupendous amount of feedback, and it takes a difficult load to excite the AB transition, but it’s still there. Speed is the friend of op-amps, so the ... | |
| 300b lovers Love ’em or hate ’em, DACs have gone a long way in the last thirty years, and continue to evolve pretty quickly. The internals of the AKM and ESS converters run at 90 MHz, with stupendous processing power. It’s what makes 4K TV and digicams possib... | |
| 300b lovers Well, enough of the rant on DACs. Addressing the question in the post by lewinskyh01, what does a really good tube linestage bring to the table if the DAC can directly drive the power amps? A sense of ease, dynamic impact, and sometimes more vivi... | |
| 300b lovers Hi, Lewinskih01! You bring up two different approaches to system building. One is taking full advantage of modern multichannel DAC chips (8-channel is a common default size) and letting DSP do the heavy lifting. Taking it a bit further, tuning ea... | |
| 300b lovers IT coupling dates back to the 1920’s Atwater Kent and radios of that vintage. Like field coil loudspeakers, it is the oldest form of coupling of all. But transformers have always been labor-intensive and expensive (going right to the beginning of ... | |
| 300b lovers Once you hear the difference an IT makes, you realize: "Aha! So that’s what RC coupling sounds like!" And then you start hearing that coloration everywhere in mainstream audio equipment, and can never forget what it sounds like. This is an experi... |