Just wanted to drop a note to everyone here that my TSE with 45's has never sounded as good.
I made a few changes in building this board and aside from some problems in the beginning documented here this amp has never sounded as good. My 1'st TSE never sounded bad it just did not have the huge soundstage and see through quality I have now. I feel break in has helped. I changed the large lytic cap (450 uF) for C5 to a Nichicon LKX series ( 493-14388-ND DIGIKEY) and the caps at C8 and C10 to Nichicon audio caps (493-4628-1-ND).
I feel the bigiest difference was I spent the big bucks for a Mullard CV 593 rectifier. It was NOS and sounded good from the start but now I cannot believe what I am hearing. The sound is rich and open. I cannot believe the amount of information in recordings I have owned for 25 years. I can pick out the character of the playing of background instruments like never before, even hoe one player is slightly off beat.
This is a testiment to the design.
I know a few of us are having some build problems as of late, as I did, but this amp is worth it. By the way the CV 593 gives me around 310 volts, I just dropped my bias back to 27ma to compensate. The tubes just may like the extra juice, nothing seems to run hot.
I made a few changes in building this board and aside from some problems in the beginning documented here this amp has never sounded as good. My 1'st TSE never sounded bad it just did not have the huge soundstage and see through quality I have now. I feel break in has helped. I changed the large lytic cap (450 uF) for C5 to a Nichicon LKX series ( 493-14388-ND DIGIKEY) and the caps at C8 and C10 to Nichicon audio caps (493-4628-1-ND).
I feel the bigiest difference was I spent the big bucks for a Mullard CV 593 rectifier. It was NOS and sounded good from the start but now I cannot believe what I am hearing. The sound is rich and open. I cannot believe the amount of information in recordings I have owned for 25 years. I can pick out the character of the playing of background instruments like never before, even hoe one player is slightly off beat.
This is a testiment to the design.
I know a few of us are having some build problems as of late, as I did, but this amp is worth it. By the way the CV 593 gives me around 310 volts, I just dropped my bias back to 27ma to compensate. The tubes just may like the extra juice, nothing seems to run hot.
It *shouldn't*, but, even with my mediocre equipment, I have been able to measure distortion differences between different rectifier tubes, even when the voltage output differs by only a few volts.
One that sticks out in my mind is when I was fooling around with the low voltage SSE - a 6106 worked fine, a 6087 put up some pretty ugly numbers - even though it put out a few volts more than the 6106 .....
So, if people say they can hear differences between rectifier tubes ( or any tubes ), I'm not going to argue with them, just because I can't.
Win W5JAG
One that sticks out in my mind is when I was fooling around with the low voltage SSE - a 6106 worked fine, a 6087 put up some pretty ugly numbers - even though it put out a few volts more than the 6106 .....
So, if people say they can hear differences between rectifier tubes ( or any tubes ), I'm not going to argue with them, just because I can't.
Win W5JAG
I took a leap of faith buying the Mullard. I also bought a couple of Brimar CV593 - GZ32 tubes from ebay in England but have not received them yet ($20.00 bucks a pop). I paid $120.00 for the Mullard-in the long rund far less than what you need to pay for a good used Mullard 5AR4.
With a CL-80 inrush current limiter it takes 15 seconds for music to start to play. So I feel the faster start of the CL593 rectifier should be good.
With a CL-80 inrush current limiter it takes 15 seconds for music to start to play. So I feel the faster start of the CL593 rectifier should be good.
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