I finally got around to building a matching "color" pre-amp for my KT120 mono blocks and am loving the sound from them! Gut punching bass and overall detailed yet powerful sound. I ended up with an idle bias @ 90ma at ~500V across the tube using early production KT120 tubes. These early tubes will bias at 115ma without distress (new production won't!) but I don't need the extra few W the hotter bias provides and they still have that rich "KT120 sound" at 90ma. At 80ma and lower, they definitely lose that unique sound these tubes give. Shout out to Thermionic Labs for the output transformers I used for this build!
For anyone duplicating this set, on the preamp setup: I found adjusting the output volume control to half, and then adjusting the input gain pots to the upper end of your normal listening level seemed to work really well, obviously you can adjust the balance between the input and output gain to your taste.
www.skunkiedesigns.com
For anyone duplicating this set, on the preamp setup: I found adjusting the output volume control to half, and then adjusting the input gain pots to the upper end of your normal listening level seemed to work really well, obviously you can adjust the balance between the input and output gain to your taste.
www.skunkiedesigns.com
These mono amps actually make up to 18Wrms (depending on bias point), so they are far from limited to super high efficiency horn speakers 🙂 Testing at 114ma bias starts at 10:00 time stamp.
