• 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.

KT88 Tube amplifier THD Question

Hello,

I have a Kt88 tube amplifier that I ran some tests on with The Stuff Made audio analyzer suite. In the THD Test after it hits 10k hz the distortion drops like a cliff. I dont have a whole lot of experience testing amplifiers and would like to know if anyone can tell me if this is normal. I attached a screenshot.

Thanks
 

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I'd recommend you do a loopback test, to identify the frequency response of your test setup, and the baseline distortion response in your test setup. Note that you have a frequency span of 20kHz, but also a bandwidth of 20kHz, such that a test signal of 10kHz can only be assessed for its 2nd harmonic level at 20kHz, as any higher frequency harmonics are excluded by the bandwidth limit. Effectively you need a 96kHz bandwidth (192kHz sampling) to measure the first 10 harmonics of a 10kHz signal. Also best to exclude the N aspect of THD+N, if your interest is just harmonic distortion.
 
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