• 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.

Looking for a good valve preamp

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Doug,

Still new to all this. So how do you determine how much gain you need?

Alan

This is much harder if you still have a phonograph.

If you only have CD, The CD player usually has a maximum output specification. This is usually about 2 Vrms
The amp also has an input sensitivity spec, usually under 2 Vrms. for full power. In this case, you do not need gain.

The Heretical is a good example of a tube Preamp without gain. The B1 from Firstwatt is a solid state example.

Does this help?

Doug
 
Three 6922's will make you a nice version of the FVP5. I had a thread describing the evolution of my design version of the FVP5 some time ago using three ECC88's. The secret is to substitute MOSFETS for the top triode in the original. This worked very well and I still have it now. I rebuilt it using ECF80's which sounds marginally better. Short of going balanced I cannot see me building another preamp.

Do a search on FVP5 and shoog and you might get a bit of inspiration.

Shoog
 

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This is much harder if you still have a phonograph.

If you only have CD, The CD player usually has a maximum output specification. This is usually about 2 Vrms
The amp also has an input sensitivity spec, usually under 2 Vrms. for full power. In this case, you do not need gain.

The Heretical is a good example of a tube Preamp without gain. The B1 from Firstwatt is a solid state example.

Does this help?

Doug


Actually, the average output from a CD player is much lower than the maximum output.
I think it is not a good idea to determine the gain from that number.
In my experience a 0.2-0.3 Vrms sensitivity for a integrated amp (i.e. 1W output) or 0.1-0.2 Vrms for a preamp (i.e. 1Vrms output) work better.

Cheers,
45
 
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