Hey all,
I wanted to put something out there because when I went looking I did not find much on the topic: Plitron, single ended transformers.
In the end I found a pair of fellows who had heard them and spoke highly of them. One of those fellows I had a bunch of trust in. Now I own Plitrons...and yes he was right about them.
Add my voice to the small chorus.
Do you want to know what kind of good? The very good kind of good, good in every direction. You have some high hopes when you drop a grand on just a part of an amp. My expectations were met and even exceeded.
Consider the source, me: I'm about 27 serious years into audio the last 10 in tube gear, only 7 years building but I've had some very good tutelage...and my ears are still quite good.
What do I listen for? I listen for beauty. I listen for tone. I listen for the subtle rhythms underneath the voices that carry them along. And the system has to have guts, balls if you will.
What was my standard before? Best bargin out there I think is the James 6123H. It took a lot for me to step up large to the Plitrons. They are frankly out of my league, three times the James but damn if they don't do EVERYTHING that much better even given that I am up past the knee on the price/performance graph.
I could go on and on but to what end? I'm just trying to pay back a little for all those who helped me on this forum and others. If you are in America or Canada this is a great source of some of the best tech out there for SET. Shipping overseas might be hard given the poundage and taxes but perhaps you have your means of getting past all that. There may be better SET transformers out there, I may never know. I'm saying these Plitrons are worth all of my fun tickets...on just one aspect of amp design, literally a whole year's building budget. Yup, they are that good.
I wanted to put something out there because when I went looking I did not find much on the topic: Plitron, single ended transformers.
In the end I found a pair of fellows who had heard them and spoke highly of them. One of those fellows I had a bunch of trust in. Now I own Plitrons...and yes he was right about them.
Add my voice to the small chorus.
Do you want to know what kind of good? The very good kind of good, good in every direction. You have some high hopes when you drop a grand on just a part of an amp. My expectations were met and even exceeded.
Consider the source, me: I'm about 27 serious years into audio the last 10 in tube gear, only 7 years building but I've had some very good tutelage...and my ears are still quite good.
What do I listen for? I listen for beauty. I listen for tone. I listen for the subtle rhythms underneath the voices that carry them along. And the system has to have guts, balls if you will.
What was my standard before? Best bargin out there I think is the James 6123H. It took a lot for me to step up large to the Plitrons. They are frankly out of my league, three times the James but damn if they don't do EVERYTHING that much better even given that I am up past the knee on the price/performance graph.
I could go on and on but to what end? I'm just trying to pay back a little for all those who helped me on this forum and others. If you are in America or Canada this is a great source of some of the best tech out there for SET. Shipping overseas might be hard given the poundage and taxes but perhaps you have your means of getting past all that. There may be better SET transformers out there, I may never know. I'm saying these Plitrons are worth all of my fun tickets...on just one aspect of amp design, literally a whole year's building budget. Yup, they are that good.
I have had the great pleasure of hearing jdg123's 46 amplifiers with the James transformers which was literally a mesmerizing listening experience to say the least.
Its the type of amplifier listening experience that people pay $20,000 a pair. jdg123 had told me that he could never afford such costs. So he asked me what it
would take to build such an amplifier. My response was "If you want something extraordinary you have to do extraordinary things" Some of his trust in my designing
came after he made a 1000 mi journey to my home. After which came a few yrs of design and refinement.
I would like to add that I was real hesitant about the Plitron's from other peoples experiences. But I was fortunate to hear a great 300B amplifier using them.
I hear none of the negative experiences I read about including the lack of bass.
His BOS46's are extremely quick with only a few ohms of DCR in the power path. IMO one of the great contributors to his amplifiers sound quality has to be his
Tube based 6D22 Bridge Rectifiers. He also has a lot of iron I believe 12 pieces/monoblock including plate chokes and grid chokes.
Photo's will be posted when jdg123 or I can get to the task.
SET12
Its the type of amplifier listening experience that people pay $20,000 a pair. jdg123 had told me that he could never afford such costs. So he asked me what it
would take to build such an amplifier. My response was "If you want something extraordinary you have to do extraordinary things" Some of his trust in my designing
came after he made a 1000 mi journey to my home. After which came a few yrs of design and refinement.
I would like to add that I was real hesitant about the Plitron's from other peoples experiences. But I was fortunate to hear a great 300B amplifier using them.
I hear none of the negative experiences I read about including the lack of bass.
His BOS46's are extremely quick with only a few ohms of DCR in the power path. IMO one of the great contributors to his amplifiers sound quality has to be his
Tube based 6D22 Bridge Rectifiers. He also has a lot of iron I believe 12 pieces/monoblock including plate chokes and grid chokes.
Photo's will be posted when jdg123 or I can get to the task.
SET12
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I've had the displeasure of helping a local friend with a single ended amp using some James output transformers. They were the version that had adequate inductance for pretty good low frequency response, but the treble was a mess! It looks like they changed that model and reduced the primary inductance to shore up the treble response, but that took its toll on the LF response in the process. (The 6123H vs. 6123HS)
Fortunate for jdg123 I had his James Outputs in my 811-10 amplifiers briefly with no real issues I can't quite remember the model # right now but they were decent enough
Here is a photo of his amplifiers with EML45's along with the James. they are quite large taking up a space nearly 3ft by 3ft. We used a pair of torrid power transformers in parallel to help with the 6D22 heater currents we also paralleled the HV secondaries.
Here is a photo of his amplifiers with EML45's along with the James. they are quite large taking up a space nearly 3ft by 3ft. We used a pair of torrid power transformers in parallel to help with the 6D22 heater currents we also paralleled the HV secondaries.
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Finally was able to get at this image of jdg123's BOS46's as they are named.
jdg123 built these in what I like to think of a 1930's style.
Surprising how quite they are for being so large.
Most of the iron is underneath.
Plitron's to the left.
[url=https://postimg.org/image/gnn2zmdi9/]
jdg123 built these in what I like to think of a 1930's style.
Surprising how quite they are for being so large.
Most of the iron is underneath.
Plitron's to the left.
[url=https://postimg.org/image/gnn2zmdi9/]
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
[/URL]
Thanks, but the real credit goes to jdg123 for the build I was the circuit designer which BTW is not a classical design. He used a jewelers saw for most of his metal fabrication. The warm glow is the LED cathode biasing of a 12BH7.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Oh, nobody really wants the schematic because nobody’s going to drop $2k in (even if you bought all Hammond) iron on something they’ve never heard. And there is no way around the iron if you want to build this amp, it is all about the iron
Cheers!
Heck, i'd just want to see the schematic purely out of curiosity -- it loops good in real life. Now I wouldn't understand the math or theroy behind it all, but it must be awesome to see nothing but one resistor and one capacitor in the signal path and all the iron on paper.
What are these amplifiers pushing in terms of speakers?
BOS 46
Alright Shef, it is just hand drawn and needs some corrections like the value on the bias depends on the tube, 35mA for 45 and 22mA for the 46, L6 is smudged but you can still see the connection, the James OTX is now Plitron... there may be others. I keep thinking I'll get around to making a better version but the basics are there.
Cheers and happy New Year!
Alright Shef, it is just hand drawn and needs some corrections like the value on the bias depends on the tube, 35mA for 45 and 22mA for the 46, L6 is smudged but you can still see the connection, the James OTX is now Plitron... there may be others. I keep thinking I'll get around to making a better version but the basics are there.
Cheers and happy New Year!
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