• WARNING: Tube/Valve amplifiers use potentially LETHAL HIGH VOLTAGES.
    Building, troubleshooting and testing of these amplifiers should only be
    performed by someone who is thoroughly familiar with
    the safety precautions around high voltages.

Regulated psu for tube preamp

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SvErD said:
I bet it's this one, plays very nice by the way even though it's not textbook........:cool:

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=131443#post131443

I put together a breadboard of this (used half of a 6SN7) and it is a very interesting effects box, but not even vaguely an accurate preamp. It choked when asked to swing more than 3V peak, and at that level, it had over 10% distortion. Gain of less than 2, but the distortion is so bad that it's difficult to assign a number. All of this is predictable from the datasheet curves which show the plate resistance as a function of current- it gets VERY steep at currents lower than 5mA (this circuit runs about 1.1-1.2mA). The tiny plate load means that the linearity is dominated by the plate resistance. The mu also becomes strongly nonlinear in this current and voltage range.

My generator source Z is quite low- for something fed from a potentiometer, expect the distortion to go higher since the tube is biased very near the region where grid current distortion begins.

There are tubes suitable for low voltage use. 6J5/6SN7 are not one of them.
 
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