6DK6 amp schematics?

[chillysalsa]

Hello,

Just wondering if anyone has had any experience with these tubes? What is the story about them?

I am planning a OTL cathode follower as per the schematic below.

Was wondering if anything special would be required for plate and filament power supplies?

I wonder what the total output would be for this amp...

Many thanks...

[PRR]

GE's 6DK6 maximum screen voltage is 150V, here it gets 198.5V. (TungSol gives 330V, though only 225V at this operating point.) Working the plate right to its power rating too.

> I wonder what the total output would be for this amp...

Output stage standing current seems to be 140mA. The peak output for symmetrical waveforms can be no more than the standing current. The RMS current is 0.707 times the peak current. So 100mA or 0.1A, squared, times 8 ohms, is.... 0.08 watts.

Distortion is likely to be over 10% even at half-power (0.04 Watts); I get ~33% THD (pure 2nd harmonic) when taken to just below the 0.08 watt clipping point.

The output cap fooled me. milliFarads? That's 1,000 microfarads. Don't be as dumb as me and try 1uFd, the bass cutoff will be 20KHz.

> these tubes? What is the story about them?

Better-quality TV IF tube. Low 3rd harmonic and IM distortion (high 2nd harmonic), high stage gain in capacitance-limited tuned-circuits, modest gain reduction possible. Good choice for wideband 10MHz-50MHz IF amplifiers. Darn odd choice for a single-ended audio amplifier.

> anything special would be required for plate and filament power supplies?

Heater supply can be anything that has the power. It won't be fussy.

This overloaded cathode follower has very little intrinsic ripple rejection from B+. It isn't that bad because gross inefficiency works to our favor. It has maybe 26dB ripple rejection. Taking 1mV ripple at the speaker as a criteria, you want 20mV ripple at B+. An economic rectifier cap gives about 2% ripple or 4V. So you need 4V/20mV or 46dB additional ripple filtering. One monster R-C, or two large R-C, or maybe a large L-C. The L-C case suggests a power choke much larger than this output choke.

Output choke DCR is critical. If forced to use something "too low", you can add resistance, but a choke with too much DCR will starve the already-thin standing current.

[rpapps]

Hi Chillysalsa
I think the output tubes should be 6KD6, a TV horizontal sweep tube. You can find the data sheet here.

http://www.mif.pg.gda.pl/homepages/frank/sheets65.html

Cheers
Rob

[PRR]

> I think the output tubes should be 6KD6

It seems to use 15 output tubes and eats 150mA including the driver. That says <10mA per tube. The mighty 6KD6 would be total over-kill for 10mA each.

At the noted 150mA and 10 ohm bias resistance, grid bias is 1.5V. The grid voltage to hold 6KD6 down to 10mA each at ~200V on G2 is around -30 or -40V. With 10 ohms under 15 6KD6 the plate current is on the order of 150mA each, 2.2 Amps for the array of 15.

It also says heaters are 6V at 5 Amps. Fifteen 6DK6 plus a 12AU7 is 16*0.3A= 4.5 Amps. 6KD6 eats a whopping 6.3V 2.85 Amps each, so 15 of those and the 12AU7 is just over 43 Amps, somewhat more than the 5A noted on the plan.

I agree that the 6KD6 is a more interesting transformerless speaker driver. But it does not seem to be what Tim Williams had in mind.

[chillysalsa]

Thanks for the incredibly informative analysis.

It seems using the quoted 6dk6 would not be very useful. Maybe as a headphone amp, but then into a 32-300 ohms there would be even less power, but just barely enough to be workable?

[jlsem]

Beware that you may be the first person to ever build this amp and that working out problems and details will be up to you. I would stick to a proven design that has been built and tweaked by other people first.

John

[chillysalsa]

I'm afraid it may not be worth the trouble. 40 free tubes = costly headaches. And if I'm successful, it would result in an amp that has too little power to be of use to me optimized for signals >10 MHz.

I think I will build some thing with the 6080 tubes that I also came across.

Thanks for the input!

[audiousername]

Originally posted by chillysalsa
Maybe as a headphone amp, but then into a 32-300 ohms there would be even less power

Quite the contrary, in fact.

OTLs will give more power into a higher impedance load, since they are invariably current limited. The higher impedance allows them to swing more voltage before running into current limitation, resulting in more power.

[Sch3mat1c]

Whoa! You guys jumped all over this one.

I would've posted sooner but besides sleep, it seems the OP also seperately e-mailed me for comments. Great minds think alike, my reply basically mirrored your reply PRR.

6KD6 would be a skookum OTL tube, particularly 15 in parallel, but I have 30 x 6DK6, only 4 x 30KD6.

Oh, and yeah, I saved keystrokes by writing "1mF" instead of "1000µF".

Tim

[chillysalsa]

But, a 1000uF cap... right in the signal path???