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    Building, troubleshooting and testing of these amplifiers should only be
    performed by someone who is thoroughly familiar with
    the safety precautions around high voltages.

12BH7A in common cathode

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Hi,

I am building on a little testproject with tubes. It is ment to drive the Firstwatt F4 amplifier, so gain must be in the area of 20dB and the output swing about 14Vrms.

Today I am using a BoZ single MOSFET common source amplifier and I would like to compare this topology directly with a tube stage as this:

One 12BH7A tube, common cathode stage, +300V B+. With a decoupled cathode resistor gain should be just about 20dB...what I am missing is optimum bias and Plate resistor.

My calculations say the following:

Rplate=10K, Rcathode=270R, Ip=15mA, Vplate=150V
Rplate=15K, Rcathode=470R, Ip=10mA, Vplate=150V

what will be best conditions?
 
I have now the version with 15K plate resistor working and it is performing very well indeed. But there is still work to do:

I have two 12BH7A tubes, and only one of them is free from hum. The other have hum/noise in one of the sections. Is this a bad tube?

Most, it not all hum has been removed with different layout test. All is done on a wood plate, so no chassis is present. I use AC heater with 6.3V. But there are som noise present in both channels. Like hiss from a cassette recorder without Dolby...

I am used to SS circuits, where you are done when the hum issues are solved, but this seems different. The PSU is a simple CRC after 4x1N4007 diodes. As this is hum free i thought is was all needed...

Could this noise be a PSU problem? Or is it the 12BH7A tubes? Or is it just something that is normal in tube circuits?
 
I have found tha the tube is extreamely sensetive to mechanical surrounds. Tapping on it with a match sounds like hammering on waterpipes with heavy tools (in the speakers)!

Tapping a finger on the table besides the amp can also be clearly heard....is the normal for tubes?
 
Yes, it is normal for tubes (with real grids, grid as in length of wire wound into a grid, not a solid piece of mesh or rod or anything like that) to be microphonic, though some tubes are far more susceptible to this than others.
 
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