This lampizator was made in april 07 during one fine weekend I spent
together with
Ewgenniy Kreminski, the master himself.
We sat together and lied a plan
for the ultimate lampizator, regardless of cost, heat, and size. I mean
- I lied the pen, paper and wino. Ewgennyi drew the ideas for the
monster. That is called collaborative genius at work.
It is a breathtaking machine and it WORKS folks !
Ewgennyi sipping Cabernet after the monster MEGA LAMPIZATOR
played the first tunes.
The tubes: double triodes 6H13C (in latin 6N13S) are meant primarily
for
power tubes for amps. They are huge. I can't imagine anybody who is
normal to use these power triodes as small signal amplifiers. It seems
like totally crazy idea. (wait a minute, didn't Manley (the old man)
use 300 B as small signal tube for his preamp ??? But again, he is not
"normal")
In the simple resistor-loaded
anode follower, they have very small amplification factor of 2, (normal
tubes have 30 in average !!!) very low
output impedance (300 Ohm) and the sound has unlimited space, depth,
clarity and
detail. The sound is very mature, big, effortless, with true timbre and
great macro and micro dynamics. In my book this becomes a reference for
super high quality lampization.
Of course it makes also a great preamp.
In fact, this is an OTL class A amplifier.
Let's put things into perspective - the 6H13 is a LARGE
tube ;-)
On the photos below you see it inside my passive preamplifier,
but the relay boards are not connected (the red thingies)
The grey cubes are paper in oil capacitors in anode supply smoothing
circuit.
Ewgenniy likes to put a 20 uF PIO straight after his bridge rectifiers.
After
that to the right comes a 380 Ohm resistor, then 330uF lytics
capacitor, then split two parallel 380 Ohm resistors, split into two
phases of balanced circuit (or into L-R channels of SE circuits).
I used two power toroids (seen on the extreme left) because of heater
demands - 3A per tube (6,3 V DC) !!!
The tubes sit in standard octal bases. I positioned them
horizontally to save space.
Lampizator layout of the octal
base:
OCTAL BASE:
7 and 8 are heaters, 1 is grid, 2 = anode, 3=cathode - and second
triode - 4 is grid2, 5 = anode2, 6 is
cathode2.
We used typical anode follower SE triode in pure class A and zero
feedback. We had low current but seriously I would aim at 40 mA to let
the tube sing.
Hooked to my Grundig 9009 with softers straight from DACs and balanced
secondaries - this makes - what seemed to me that evening as the
best CD in the world period. That's ihow good it was.
Proposed power transformer:
For SE operation:
core: 35 VA (minimum ) toroid
1 secondary 6,3 V AC / 4 A heaters winding
1 secondary 120 V AC / 0,1 A for anodes
1 screen winding.
This is good for one tube - which contains internally two triodes -
good enough for stereo.
For balanced - use a 50 VA core and two heater windings. And of course
- two tubes
After some time I changed the R2 - anode resistor - to be 1,5 K not 7.
Otherwise there is not enough anode voltage.
The cathode biasing resistor should also be smaller than 300 Ohms,
maybe 100 is good.
The tube can handle 120 mA per half so if we arrive at 30, 40 or 50
does not matter. Only the supply caps must increase with higher current.
After two years I still think
that the experiment was a lot of fun and worth trying, but seriously -
the other lampizators beat the megalampizator in too many areas.
Especially the 6N2P tube in SRPP beats the mega seriosly.
What the mega has is certain sound maturity, size, dimension,
effortless dynamics - which no other tube has. But the amount of detail
is not enough for me.
Try it yourself and see how you like it.
WARNING !
This solution is ONLY for the V out dacs. Not for I out dacs !!!
